Yes, and I want to add a couple of points.
The administrative law judge panel is a good idea, because when I went through the Federal Court database some time back, reading every case I could find on citizenship, I was frankly amazed at how few cases there were. There is not a substantial body of case law there, and this is a problem for citizens because when they go to find a citizenship lawyer, good luck. There are tons of immigration lawyers; there's money in immigration. There's no money in citizenship, and so you don't find them. That's one problem for practitioners.
Another is that you have this system that's cranking out decisions left and right, but the rationale is never brought to light. It's never made available for others to see and to vet, and so one part of the system may be doing this, another part is doing that. Somebody is unfairly denied something, but you never hear about it. These are people getting mugged in the dark.
If you want to bring transparency to the system and raise the quality of the decisions being made, one way of doing that is to say, “Okay, this decision is going to go on the web. We're going to put a panel of professional judges in here, and they're going to vet these things, and when they issue a ruling, the ruling is going to be public.” There are all of the benefits that flow from that, not least of which is that even as administrative law opinions, they can be used for precedential value.
That also plugs a huge gap between what you have now, where the citizenship judge is the only alternative somebody has in the process right now, and Federal Court. Spend your life's savings on Federal Court, or if you feel lucky, go to a citizenship judge, whose decision is based on a summary prepared by the prosecutor. I don't know anybody in the western hemisphere who thinks that if you have a dispute with the citizenship processing centre evaluator, it is a good idea to have that person who is prosecuting your case be the one to write it up and present it to somebody else without any input from you, other than maybe what you've put on paper. The only obligation these citizenship judges have is to read that summary, unless something piques their curiosity, and then they can ask for the file. That's sort of an abortion of justice right there.
I am a big fan of transparency. It's worked for California across a number of fields. I don't see why it couldn't work in citizenship. If we hold citizenship as dear as we say, let's put a few judges out there, get this system on track, and then audit the thing. Audit it initially to see that it's on track and that it's working, and certainly audit randomly the decisions coming out of the case processing centre. Let's see what that turns up. I'm kind of curious here.
There's another reason there isn't as large a body of law there, and that's because some people just don't have the money to go to court.
Something else comes into play here. If you have people who come from different countries, maybe they grew up in a culture that's a bit different. Maybe they're very deferential to authority. If somebody in Sydney says no, they don't challenge it, maybe, or they don't have the resources to challenge it, or they don't know how. The result is the same--they go away. Then there are those who have the money and mount the challenge in Federal Court at considerable cost to themselves, and the moment it looks like they're losing, maybe the government attorneys do what any attorney would do--they go and offer to settle. So those don't make it into the database either.
I suggest that what you see in the database is a very skewed picture of what goes on in Sydney, and quite possibly Ottawa, because all of the cases that could get there don't, and the system is stacked against making that happen. I don't think that's in the benefit.... We wouldn't be wrangling with some of these problems here if you had a more effective system at that end, doing what it ought to be doing in the way it ought to be doing it.
That's one thing.
