Thank you for inviting us.
Parkdale Community Legal Services has been involved in immigration issues for over 35 years in the city of Toronto, working with law students who come through our program. We work with immigrants, who are the most vulnerable members of the community. We have been involved in the process of the new Immigration Act as part of a major coalition of organizations involved in the new Immigration Act, and we're therefore going to be speaking today briefly about our concern about the amendments that have been proposed and attached to the budget bill.
However, at this point we want to address the issues that the committee is studying in its trip across Canada.
On the issue of Iraqi refugees, I would just briefly like to say that there's a terrible crisis with Iraqi refugees. We trust that the numbers our government decides to take to ease this crisis will not just replace other refugees who are already looking for a place to settle in Canada. We don't want to just see the same percentage level of refugees. If we are going to respond to the Iraqi refugee crisis, then we should be seeing the percentage of government-sponsored refugees increase.
Turning to the issue of undocumented workers, at Parkdale Community Legal Services we see many undocumented workers who are here in Canada. We see them as children who are not going to school; we see them as women who have been waiting for sponsorship or who are in situations of abuse and have left their sponsor; we see them as failed refugees who do not have an appeal, even though an appeal is part of the Immigration Act that was passed.
We know that the government has not yet implemented the Refugee Appeal Division. We work on many of the cases of those same refused refugees, some of whom have a very sincere and significant fear about what will happen to them if they return. We have a decision on life-and-death issues being made by one board member at a hearing, and if it doesn't go with you, then the judicial review procedure is not enough to correct the problem if mistakes happen in the system.
We have that situation of undocumented workers, and what do we have in place for it right now? We have something called the humanitarian and compassionate application. It costs $550 to apply for regularization of status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. That's why Parkdale Community Legal System appeared before this committee in 2005 and talked about the fees. You may have seen some of the postcards; more than 15,000 of these have already been signed and delivered to Parliament asking for a reduction or the possibility of waiver of the $550 fee whenever there is a situation in which the person cannot pay it. Those are the most vulnerable situations; those are the cases I've been mentioning to you, of children, of women who have not been sponsored, of refused refugees sometimes suffering from severe trauma.
The $550 fee is something that's been in place. This current government reduced the right of landing fee, which was $975, to $490. But the processing fee just to start your application, which applies even to a child refugee who is a principal applicant, continues to be $550. We see the situation of the Children's Aid Society having to provide money to pay this fee. The fee continues to be a huge problem.
It's something everyone shakes their head about, but the bureaucrats continue to collect this money, and there is no possibility of getting rid of it. You cannot bring your application if you don't pay that fee, so the fee is a big problem.
The lack of a refugee appeal system is a big problem.
What we are going to address as well is what happens to the undocumented workers who are in this situation of not being able to apply--and we have a solution.
Some of my colleagues on the panel today have indicated that there have been past programs. One that I know about, because I was starting out in my law career at that time, was the anonymous application to adjust status through a third party. This is a way that you can check out the person. The person can come forward through a third party, give the facts of their case, get an approval, and then be processed for landing. If everything checks out, they become a permanent resident. This would be one of the ways to deal with the undocumented workers who are in our midst, who are part of our economy and are contributing to our economy, and who have a good reason to be here.
My colleague is Abigail Martinez. She is going to be speaking on the situation of temporary foreign workers.