Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Members of the committee, thank you for inviting the Law Society to take part in the hearings today.
The Law Society of British Columbia has its mandate set by the Legal Profession Act, and first and foremost in its mandate is its obligation to protect the public in the administration of justice. It's under that mandate that I appear here today.
You'll be pleased to know that I'm going to limit my comments to one thing only, and that's the issue of unregistered immigration consultants. The Law Society is concerned and continues to be concerned, as it has been for many years, that the public continues to be harmed by unregistered immigration consultants who provide legal services to the public with respect to immigration matters, even though they are neither registered immigrant consultants nor lawyers.
Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the regulations made thereunder, only authorized representatives are entitled, for a fee, to provide legal services to clients involved in immigration proceedings or applications. Authorized representatives, as set out in the regulation, are lawyers, Quebec notaries, and members of the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants. This is to ensure that only qualified individuals who are regulated by a responsible body are allowed to take money for representing very vulnerable individuals.
While the regulation provides that only authorized representatives can provide legal services in relation to immigration matters for a fee, unregistered immigration consultants continue to provide legal services, often very badly, or offer to provide legal services contrary to the regulation. Unregistered immigration consultants may mask their involvement in the preparation of immigration documents by having the applicant sign the documents on his or her own behalf. Occasionally, clients do not learn that the immigration consultant is not registered and will not be able to represent them at a hearing until just shortly before the hearing takes place. You can imagine how upsetting that is for these vulnerable clients. In other cases, unregistered immigration consultants say they can provide immigration services; they charge and collect a fee, but they never in fact deliver the services.
The Law Society of British Columbia, even years after the Supreme Court of Canada said in Law Society of British Columbia v. Mangat that immigration consultants were a federal responsibility, continues to receive complaints from members of the public about the quality or lack of services provided by unregistered immigration consultants. Some complain that they have paid thousands of dollars to these consultants and have received little or no services or that the services provided were inadequate. Sometimes the advice they receive harms their immigration applications; they're given bad advice on how to complete the forms.
The immigrant community is vulnerable and requires protection from untrained, unregulated, uninsured, and at times unscrupulous unregistered immigration consultants. A problem with the regulatory regime as it currently exists is that there are no effective enforcement provisions in the act to deal with unregistered immigration consultants who provide services contrary to the act and regulation. To be effective, the act should specify that providing services contrary to the act and regulation is an offence. It should further specify punishment, generally in terms of a jail term and/or a fine, for persons who provide legal services contrary to the act and regulation. Finally, it should provide for an enforcement framework, either through the police or through a division of the immigration bureaucracy.
Without effective enforcement, unregistered consultants will continue to take advantage of immigrants and potential immigrants, seriously harming Canada's standing in the international community. The Law Society of British Columbia submits that the Canadian government should adopt an effective enforcement scheme to protect this vulnerable group. How are lawyers different? I'm getting this question from the committee. The answer is that lawyers are insured, they're trained, and they're regulated.
Is every lawyer a good one? No, and of course we know that. The Law Society disciplines lawyers who aren't good and makes sure they are either disciplined.... And that's all public; that's on the Law Society's website. All our disciplinary proceedings are posted. We have practice standards reviews, and we can disbar lawyers who are dishonest or lack integrity, and so on and so forth. What's more, the public, in its dealings with lawyers, is protected because lawyers are insured.
They're not only regulated, they're also insured. None of that can be said for the unregistered immigration consultant. There's a difference. Being a lawyer doesn't guarantee that you're great, although we do our best to try to make sure we get you there. The difference is that if you're a client of a lawyer, you have some recourse. If you're a client of an unregistered immigration consultant, you have little recourse.
I was reading on the Immigration site today the policy dealing with the use of representatives who are paid or unpaid. There's a section there that tells you what to do if you work in Citizenship and Immigration Canada and you get a complaint about an unregistered immigration consultant. Do you know what clients are told? When they're dealing with a non-registered immigration consultant, they're directed to inform CSIC, which has no effective enforcement ability against unauthorized representatives, and to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, and if they can, to bring a small claims action on their behalf.
These are people who are struggling with a system. They're immigrants; they're vulnerable. That doesn't help them. They have no recourse, effectively.
Those are my submissions. I'm happy to come in under the seven minutes.