Good morning. It's always a pleasure to be in front of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.
I will basically touch base on two issues that are going to affect the work we do with non-status people and temporary workers. The first one is about immigration consultants, the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants. We have a serious issue there, because this organization is a non-profit organization, and there is not a creator of status, so they don't have any power in court or anything. Basically, the decisions they make and the investigations they make are not enforceable.
The situation we have inside the CSIC is terrible. We just want to ask the committee to take a look seriously about the creation of a creator that is in the law and has the powers to regulate inside Canada, outside Canada, and people who are not only members of the association.
Most of the people we serve in our communities have been destroyed by immoral consultants, and we don't have any resources to deal with that. By the way, the RCMP, the police, CBSA, and Immigration Canada don't do anything to stop this situation. We report the cases directly to them, and they don't do anything because they believe that is not the priority.
The other situation you will have to deal with, if you deal with non-status people and temporary workers, is the situation of the immigration consultants overseas. This is the main issue for temporary workers: the people are agents who aren't scrutinized, and they have contacts with the embassies and everything, and they corrupt the system of immigration to Canada on a temporary basis or any other basis.
We make a very small point about the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants. We have been asking the government to take a look at the society, and it doesn't do anything because it's not a priority. Maybe the standing committee can really do something to scrutinize and do an audit of that society, even though it is non-profit and they go behind that; they protect themselves from that particular situation.
The other thing that is necessary to mention is that we want to ask the parliamentary standing committee on immigration issues to use its wisdom and maturity to do something about Bill C-50. We believe you did the right thing, calling meetings for consultations about every issue you take care of, because you want to have different perspectives. It is, in our opinion, very sad to see how the other changes are changing the whole shift of Immigration Canada and destroying the criteria in the law. It's going to be, may be legally passed, and the committee is not going to have anything to do. I don't know if the committee can call and ask to analyze this bill in their hands. You have the expertise in the area.
Let me finish by saying that we realize Bill C-50 is going to affect non-status people. It's about the backlog. The backlog is related to the people we have inside Canada. They are not dealing with humanitarian applications inside Canada; they are not dealing with any situations of non-status people applying for temporary work inside Canada. Basically what they are creating is this: the backlog is going to increase, because the issue will be that more temporary workers are going to apply to come to Canada. Now we have 500,000 applications for temporary workers. We're going to have maybe double that, and we don't have the resources to deal with that situation.
So please intervene and do whatever is necessary to stop this bill from happening.