Thank you.
I apologize also, because I don't have a prepared speech to share.
The Canada Border Services Agency is responsible for providing integrated border services that support national security and public safety priorities as well as the prosperity of Canada. This is done by the administration and enforcement of various legislation, including IRPA, to facilitate the free flow of persons and goods.
To effectively manage access to Canada, we use the multiple borders concept, and we work very closely with CIC for that. Our issue is to try to keep people who may be inadmissible to Canada out before they arrive. We are the intelligence support for CIC, and we provide screening assistance to them in all their applications for immigrants, visitors, temporary workers, and students to Canada. We are the key people who work on providing an idea of threats and risks to CIC as they do their work overseas, and we provide support both in Canada and overseas, especially on admissibility involving national security, terrorism, war criminals, and people involved in organized crime.
At ports of entry, we are the service arm of Citizenship and Immigration in terms of ensuring that people who arrive in Canada have the necessary visas or travel documents and that their intent is according to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Within Canada, we are the enforcement arm of the immigration program and we investigate, detain, and remove people who have used up their processes under the Immigration Act. We are also responsible for representing both CIC and CBSA at hearings before the Immigration and Refugee Board.
Daniel spoke about officers overseas. We also have 45 migration integrity officers overseas who report to Canada Border Services Agency. They work very closely with Citizenship and Immigration and in most places report to a Citizenship and Immigration program manager overseas. The reason we have done this is that where CBSA is not represented, CIC represents the aspects of migration integrity work.
The work we do there is to work with airlines to try to ensure that anyone boarding a flight has the documents they need to be able to arrive in Canada. We also work with Citizenship and Immigration in anti-fraud. When there is a fraud pattern organized in either facilitation applications or immigration applications or visitor applications, we are the part of the program that assists CIC in developing tools to deal with it.
In Canada, we are the intelligence directorate for both CBSA and CIC. That involves three major...I'm going to call them three big issues.
We do trends analysis: what are the risks that are coming down the pipe; what are the things Citizenship and Immigration officers need to be aware of as they're making decisions?
We also provide screening assistance in cases where there may be organized crime, war crimes, or terrorism issues, where we can provide more assistance to officers in making the decisions overseas and also in Canada.
Also, we are the migration integrity officer support network. At the port of entry, we ensure that travellers arriving in Canada who are visitors or permanent residents have the documentation they need to be able to arrive in Canada.
We also ensure that if there are any medical issues that may have come up since someone got on a flight and arrived at a port of entry, we support the mandate of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act on that.
We also do the front-end screening for refugee claimants as they arrive, and then the cases are referred, as has been indicated, to the Immigration and Refugee Board for processing. In the cases that Daniel called our “real bad guys”, we would help to identify who these people are and make the case for them to be excluded from the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
In the area of detention and removals, we are responsible for detaining people who should be detained under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. We have four detention facilities—one in Laval, one in Toronto, one at the Vancouver International Airport, and a new one in Kingston—for our security cases.
Again, just to provide an overview for those of you who are new to the committee, under the legislation we detain basically where we have reasonable grounds to believe someone might be a danger to the public, where someone is unlikely to appear for an examination or hearing or for removal, or where we have not been able to identify who the person is.
We work closely on detention with the Red Cross and other officials to ensure that we live up to our international obligations. For most long-term detainees who may be detained because they are criminally inadmissible or for other reasons, we work with and use provincial facilities. We do not have MOUs with all of them yet, but with most provinces we do. We are continuing to work to ensure that when our detainees are in provincial facilities we also live up to our international obligations.
As I indicated, we are the hearings officials who go before the Immigration and Refugee Board for both the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and the Minister of Public Safety.
There are a number of reasons we may be going into hearings. In the great majority of cases it is for detention reasons—because we want to keep someone detained—and we will make a case to the refugee board. We will also go in cases of, for example, family class refusals to explain the position of the department on why we believe this person should be not admissible to Canada.
Finally, we do removals. Some people say we do too many; many people say we don't do enough. But we do work on removals. Our priorities of course are to focus on security threats and serious criminality, but we also do failed refugee claimants, which is I guess not overly popular sometimes, and we do that to ensure the integrity of the programs.
As Daniel has pointed out, there are many kicks at the can for people to remain in Canada once people have exhausted their processes. To ensure that the system works, we have to continue removing people who are failed refugee claimants.
We also administer temporary suspension of removals where there are systemic reasons that we think we cannot remove someone for security reasons to certain countries.
I'm just going to leave it at that. I think, then, we can start answering questions.