Good morning, everyone. Thanks very much for inviting the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario to speak today.
The South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario, also known as SALCO, is one of 80 legal aid clinics funded by Legal Aid Ontario. Our mandate is to assist low-income South Asians in various areas of poverty law, including immigration, because the very nature of our community is that we have a large proportion of immigrants coming into Canada.
In relation to immigration, SALCO assists clients with sponsorship applications and appeals, applications for humanitarian and compassionate grounds, some refugee work, and judicial review work at the Federal Court.
SALCO is here today because we continue to work with clients who cannot navigate the current immigration system. Many of our clients have also been abused by immigration consultants and end up having nowhere else but SALCO to turn to, after having exhausted all their financial resources. Because we provide free legal services for people who qualify, they end up coming to us.
We'd like to highlight for you that we're also here because many of our own South Asian community members practise as immigration consultants, due to their inability to become licensed as lawyers in Canada because of strict financial and other types of barriers to becoming accredited. This context, of course, must also be acknowledged when we're looking at the issue of the problem of regulating immigration consultants.
In addition, many South Asian immigrants who come here are professionally trained back home in various fields and are unable to find jobs in their fields when they get to Canada. So immigration consulting is often a viable and sensible option for a lot of our community members.
What are we seeing at SALCO? While SALCO acknowledges the introduction of a non-profit body to regulate immigration consultants, we continue to see a number of clients who have been represented by incompetent and unethical consultants, resulting in severe consequences for them financially as well as immigration-wise. Because clients often come to SALCO after they have completely exhausted other financial resources, we feel their desperation when they come to us. They have tried every single option to obtain immigration in Canada and have not seen any of the promised results that have been guaranteed, sometimes, by their consultants. Unfortunately it has not appeared to us that this trend has reduced since the introduction of immigration consultant regulation.
Of course, SALCO also sees clients whose immigration consultants have done ethical and high-quality work. Just as there are unethical, unprofessional, and incompetent lawyers, there are unethical, unprofessional, and incompetent consultants as well.
While we believe—and I think you've heard this here today from a lot of people—that a regulatory statute would not solve all the problems associated with immigration consultants providing incompetent legal services, it would be a step in the right direction and would provide clients who have been wronged with a fair, more effective process and legal recourse.
We also think we need to acknowledge one of the root problems a lot of our clients face. It's a simple kind of problem. Many of the immigration processes that have been put in place by our government are very onerous for our clients to even consider navigating on their own. A basic sponsorship application can include up to 11 forms to be completed by the sponsor and the person being sponsored.
For an average client, the forms are confusing and difficult to understand, and for our clients, those with linguistic and cultural barriers, the task of completing applications becomes almost impossible. Couple this with a lack of financial resources and you have a situation where clients can become extremely vulnerable to incompetent immigration consultants, who at times speak the language the client speaks and who are from the community the client is from.
So one of the bigger-picture responses to the problem of immigration consultant incompetency, misrepresentation, and fraud is to simplify some of the immigration processes, such as the application to sponsor a relative, and to make the application forms more linguistically accessible to clients.
Logically, if we make it easier for people to navigate the CIC system, they will not have to seek outside help for things that should be simple processes, like sponsoring a family member.
Now, in terms of some firm examples of what we have seen at SALCO, we saw a client who had hired a consultant for assistance with a sponsorship application. Her consultant took a lofty retainer in cash and advised the client that she would handle putting in the sponsorship application. The client tried to follow up with her consultant three months later to find that the consultant had disappeared.
What is the remedy in this situation? It's to file a complaint with CSIC, an organization with no statutory backing to carry out complaints procedures in the public interest.
Although advised of the option, the client did not file an official complaint with CSIC due to both uncertainly about remedy as well as the desperation to find another legal representative right away to get the immigration process going for her again.
Another example is this. We saw a client who had hired a consultant to assist with an application for permanent residence on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. The consultant put in the initial application but did absolutely no follow-up work. The consultant's name didn't appear anywhere on the application, but his address was used as the mailing address for the client. We discovered that the consultant had received a letter from CIC two years after the application was denied. The client was required to file a new application and pay another $550 processing fee to get the process started again from scratch, which was a complete waste of time and money for our client.