Thank you.
Members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity. It is not with pleasure that I come before you, but with a heavy sense of responsibility. I speak as one member of CSIC, but as you can see from the consultants at the table and in the audience who have come from Calgary today to support this submission, I am not alone.
I have been a CSIC member since the outset. I also maintain my membership in the Canadian bar and am active in the immigration section in Calgary. I have supported the CSIC initiative in a myriad of ways, and continue to do so through my time and leadership in various industry initiatives.
For over 20 years, in the course of my legal career, I have worked with non-lawyers in one way or another, teaching and writing about the law, to allow them to take up roles in the legal system responsibly for the public benefit. I left a copy of my CV with the clerk, if the committee is interested. This initiative is no different, but I know that the long-term success of CSIC requires the mandate to be carried out with transparency and accountability, and that is not happening.
The public's interest here is that all consultants be competent and ethical, and the board itself is making many questionable decisions in that regard. So I raise my voice before such a worthy initiative as this, designed to counter one untenable situation, becomes a blight on the good reputation of Canada's immigration program.
Accreditation and discipline are the core of the mandate. Indeed, if these were tackled diligently, the education part would look after itself. There are numerous education tools in the immigration marketplace today, and CSIC could simply support them and focus on the unique aspects of its core mandate.
It could, for instance, develop a five-year plan, including such things as the number of consultants that could feasibly be brought on stream each year and absorbed into the industry. The plan should be debated and endorsed by the members so that we are all on the same page. But the members have gradually come to realize that the board has no intention of seeking members' approval for any direction of the society, now or ever.
On the contrary, it has adopted a go-it-alone attitude that is damaging the initiative greatly. At CSIC there is no plan or transparency on important matters of interest to members, especially financial affairs. There is no democracy in decision-making, as members have been denied all normal means of holding the board accountable. I outline 10 of these in my brief, but the main ones are: the denial of an in-person annual general meeting, the denial of the ability to compel a special meeting of members, and the denial of the right of members to bring forward motions for changes we want to see in the society. Hence, there is no accountability.
We see the results. Decision after decision seems to many of us to be too ad hoc, ill-considered, outside the letters patent, overly extravagant, poorly implemented, etc. But members have no ability to act, as the board does not consult with us or meet with us. I think it is a dangerous path for program integrity.
Because the board has systematically denied members their rightful role in overseeing the society, members are powerless to prevent any abuses or excesses of the mandate. They also cannot take up that responsibility now because specific institutional barriers have been erected to prevent that. These need to be dismantled.
There are five main rights denied to CSIC members that must be reinstated immediately. First is an AGM. Despite the bylaws that provide, in my view, for an in-person AGM, we have not had one because the board will not call one. The board refuses to meet with members in person to discuss the affairs of the society. So we need the right to an in-person AGM.
We have no ability to requisition a special meeting no matter how serious the concern and no matter how many members sign a written request. The board simply deleted the provision for special meetings in the final version of the bylaws, which it passed unilaterally without member input or consultation.
We have no right and no fair process to put motions forward for discussion. We need the right to put motions forward so that changes that a member seeks can be made.
We have no transparency. We need a transparency policy. There are very few things in a member-funded organization that would not be known to members. If there are exceptions, they can be listed, but the principle should be openness.
Minutes of board and committee meetings must be available to members so that we can exercise our right to oversee the affairs of the society and to call special meetings when necessary.
And finally, on financial oversight, we have no finance committee of members that is advising the CEO and the treasurer concerning the financial affairs of the society, with a careful eye on members' funds.
If we had these tools, we would not likely have the issue we now have, which is a second organization. By some sleight of hand, CSIC has morphed into two organizations with two CEOs and the concomitant dilution of the core mandate. Now CSIC members are compelled to pay for two organizations. The costs, the conflicts of interest, the inefficiency, and the distraction from the core mandate have not been justified to members.
If directors can form commercial subsidiaries without the members' approval, as happened here, where does this end? Next year will we see the world migration institute with three CEOs and a branch office in China?
Frankly, I think that CMI Inc. is a vivid illustration of the type of nonsense that members would have outright rejected if they had a voice.