Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 3rd, 2008

[Kenneth Zaifman]

Either CSIC needs more teeth or the immigration establishment--which includes Citizenship and Immigration Canada and the Canada Border Service Agency--needs more.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Could we look at an actual set of regulations that CSIC operates under? Is there a set of regulations or a book that I can pick up to see the regulations that CSIC operates under? If there is, shouldn't that be enough to shut down these rogues?

[Kenneth Zaifman]

I don't want to speak for CSIC, but when the minister's advisory committee recommended the establishment of a regulatory body outside of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, a number of recommendations were made. The minister of the day did not accept all those recommendations. My understanding is that there were enhanced enforcement provisions in the report, but they were not given to CSIC; they were retained by the then Citizenship and Immigration.

Being a realist, I realize that sometimes getting through regulations, changing acts of Parliament, or enhancing powers takes time. In my world, I think, the tools are there; it is a question of how those tools are enforced.

CBSA enforces the provisions related to the immigration act. There is language in the immigration act and in the regulations that gives them tools to go in and take certain enforcement remedies. The RCMP has tools under the immigration act, and others. The Canada Revenue Agency has tools.

We have a lot of tools. We have a lot of different departments that have a piece of this pie, but we don't have a joint--

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I interrupted you. You go on with your—

[Kenneth Zaifman]

But it's a very good point. It's a point that I think is worth making. I appreciate the interruption, because at the end of the day, this committee will make a recommendation. You will hear a litany of horror stories about consultants and probably a few lawyers. But the purpose is not to be anecdotal about how bad it is; the purpose of my presentation is to ask what the solution is—

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

That's what we're looking for.

[Kenneth Zaifman]

—within the framework we have today.

I see this as a real issue of political will. There's a recognition that a problem exists. If I had my way, I would form a joint task force of CBSA, CIC, RCMP, Service Canada, and CRA on the federal side. Look at all the tools they have. They have the powers to investigate, but they're all doing it separately.

In most cases, rogue immigration consultants don't hand out receipts for money they get from their clients; they don't want a record. But there is a mechanism in place to find out how money is being transferred from within Canada outside of Canada. CBSA has the enforcement tools, the RCMP has powers that are open to it under the Criminal Code, or local enforcement agencies....

When you look at what we call rogue agents or unlicensed consultants, more times than not they are probably violating one or more acts of Parliament and a few others that we probably haven't heard of.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

The rogue agents are really giving everyone a bad name: the John Ryans of the world and all the rest of them who—

[Kenneth Zaifman]

When CSIC started licensing consultants, those consultants who couldn't get licensed became foreign recruiters. They migrated from a regulated area to an unregulated area. Now some of the provincial governments are trying to deal with that.

I'm not here to address everything, but I'd like to tell you a brief story that perhaps makes the point. Maybe it's a typical story.

We were retained by a client who came to Canada on a work permit. He was promised a job for a certain period of time, was promised a certain salary, was promised that his family could join him. Of course, none of that happened.

What made it worse is that when the consultant tried to take him to the border to correct the problem that he had created, the immigration authorities detained him and threatened to deport him from Canada. It is only with the cooperation of CBSA, CIC, Service Canada, and the provincial nominee program that the individual is now a permanent resident and was able to have his family join him.

The tragedy of this particular case is that while this was going on, his wife, in their home country, contracted cancer and was literally dying. He could not leave the country. Finally, we were able to get, with the cooperation of the immigration authorities, the necessary authorization for him to go back and at least spend a month with his wife and then bring his children to Canada. This was a real, visceral injustice.

What could we do against this rogue agent? The only thing we could do was sue him in court for the fees he charged. We were successful, but now he has appealed that.

So this self-help remedy is very arbitrary, because it just doesn't work. How do you correct that?

These people are known. It's not as though they're hiding; they're known. Immigration authorities know who they are, provincial regulators know who they are, Service Canada knows who they are. It's a question of putting some....

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

So there's no mechanism, really, to shut them down.

[Kenneth Zaifman]

The way you shut them down is you take clear, directed action. In my view, at the end of the day you don't have to worry about whether you're going to get a conviction; the question is, what steps and tools do we have in place now?

I think if those tools were used, coordinated, integrated, and made a priority.... We've made human trafficking a priority. This is just another form of human trafficking. It is perhaps less egregious compared to some of the situations you have heard about in which women are put at risk, but it's still a form of human trafficking, and we have to expand our mindset to address those issues.

I think the tools are there. Are they the best tools? Maybe not, but used in a coordinated way and targeted at individuals, they're tools that would send a message. The message should be clear and unambiguous. If that message is sent, I think it will be delivered and will filter through the various ethnic communities. There the situation is the most problematic.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

How big is the membership?

[Kenneth Zaifman]

If I had to guess, I would say there are more rogue consultants practising in this area than there are licensed consultants and immigration lawyers combined.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Really? That's a big problem.

[Kenneth Zaifman]

You're talking about the world, right? You're talking about the world.

I don't want John Ryan to tell me I'm exaggerating, but it's just the nature of the traffic you see, of the inquiries and complaints you get. You probably get them in your own constituency offices. It's not as if members of Parliament work in isolation; they have clients. They hear these stories on a day-to-day basis, and I think the time to act is now.

I am firmly convinced that with the correct message.... I don't want to venture into the world of politics, but this is an issue common to all political parties. Every minister of immigration, whether Conservative or Liberal, has always recognized that this is an issue. They haven't always been able to give it the attention it deserves, but look at the committee reports over the years; the committee, regardless of its membership, has been fairly attuned to this issue, and it goes back many years. It's not as if we operate in isolation; we operate in the real world, and in the real world, people have these issues come up.

I think it's very important that the licensed participants, whether lawyers or consultants, be held to a perhaps higher standard, and that the regulatory tools be expanded to allow them to do what they need to do. CSIC has a daunting task. It's a national regulator. We can't even get the securities commissions to agree on a national regulator, but they're a national regulator. They have to have the ability to deal with members across the country. Law societies can't do that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

How may licensed consultants are out there?

[Kenneth Zaifman]

You know what? I can't recall. For some reason the number of 700 to 800 comes to mind. I know when they started, there were more--

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

John says yes, there are more.

[Kenneth Zaifman]

There could be more. I'm not so concerned about the regulated consultants, because I think the committee will certainly hear more about that and about how well they're regulated. My issue is that the tools to deal with those regulated consultants are perhaps offside on criminality issues and other issues, and those who are not regulated operate in isolation of any regulation.

As I say, my point in making this presentation is that the self-help remedy for applicants to go after these consultants is not an effective mechanism, so there has to be another mechanism, sponsored and funded by government, to deal with this. I think it's very important for this committee to focus on that issue, because it has recurred repeatedly over the years.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I know. I want to give you a bit of information that we have here. Currently the CSIC website shows 1,200 registered consultants, 69 of whom are based abroad; 683 have had their membership revoked in the past, many for not meeting membership criteria. The number of people acting as immigration consultants in Canada before 2004 was estimated to be 6,000, and that number does not include people working abroad and on the Internet. Accordingly, it seems fair to assume that a large number of people working as immigration consultants, both in Canada and abroad, are not registered with CSIC.

Andrew, do you have an intervention you wanted to make here?

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Yes.

With consultants overseas, there are outright shysters who we have absolutely no control over who never set foot in Canada. I've looked at advertisements in Florida: “We can get you into Canada”. There's no bloody way, but they collect the money, and it's a scam.

But it seems to me the more complicated we make the rules, the more we're making an opportunity for consultants or fraudsters or whoever to victimize some people.

Bill C-50 is going to create an interesting kind of situation, because we're going to give more power to the bureaucracy, if you will, and it has its own problems, as we have found out over the years. Never mind consultants who might be ripping off the system or the people; it's going to be people working as locally engaged staff, who sometimes are civil servants, who will be a problem.

It seems to me the more complicated the rules and the harder it is to get into the country, the more people will be taken advantage of. So the more we can simplify it, I think, the better off we are.

[Kenneth Zaifman]

Far be it from me as an immigration lawyer to say that the rules should be simpler. But I think the answer is not necessarily how complicated it is; it's how applications are processed and the transparency associated with those applications. This new system, which came in under IRPA, was designed to take out the discretion in the system. It was essentially a fill-in-the-blanks system in which you put in the number, and at the end of the day, if you passed—if you got more than this number of points—you were in, and with less you were not. That clearly has not worked.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Well, it didn't work because we couldn't get a bricklayer in when a bricklayer was needed; we couldn't get our labourers in when what the economy needed was some labourers. I come from the high-tech capital, I will say, of Canada, the home of Research in Motion. Every time you get somebody in there who's making a six-figure income plus, you make a lot of demands on the economy for service, for housing. We need those folks in the economy as well.

What we essentially have done is shut those people out, and we have created a real problem.

[Kenneth Zaifman]

We have a very diverse set of goals that the immigration act is attempting to achieve, and it may not be possible to achieve everything that it wants to achieve.

I agree that at some point someone's going to have to step back and see if we are meeting the objectives of the immigration policy that are in the preamble to the immigration act. If you read the preamble, it's intended to maintain Canada's multicultural makeup and to meet the demands of Canadian society.

I agree that we could simplify it; if we simplify it, would that solve the problem? I work with many ethnic groups, primarily in Manitoba, and I've always taken the position that there's a responsibility on the communities themselves. The communities and community leaders know who are operating properly in their community and who are not. In other words, there has to be a mechanism for them to come to the table. Government can only do so much. Regulators can only do so much. The responsibility to deal with this issue has to be shared, and those communities that are mature and have access and availability to help for recent immigrants or people like temporary foreign workers can solve some of these problems.

But I think your point is well taken. If we change the immigration act and make the requirements a little more transparent, would that eliminate consultants? Well, I don't know whether it would. My hunch is that it wouldn't, but at least if the system were less complicated and processed in a faster way, it might eliminate some of those operators who....You have to be remember that an unscrupulous immigration consultant likes delay, because he takes his money today and he knows there won't be an answer for two to three years. Delay benefits him, because he's not worried about what happens at the end; he's worried about the short term.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

The other thing we could possibly do is assign more points for what is needed in particular, such as bricklayers in the construction industry, and tie in the employer. That could be done, I think, fairly quickly. If they want to hire and fast-track this person, they're going to have responsibility in case there's any cost associated with that. Eventually we can land that person.