Thanks.
I didn't have much more to finish. I just wanted to talk a bit about one of the main problems we've been seeing at SALCO, and that's the phantom immigration consultant--when clients come to us and their applications are somehow lost or not followed through with, or the consultant who worked on their case has disappeared or has changed addresses, or refuses to transfer their file over to us. Often the consultant refuses to answer any questions about their file when we call, pretending not to have even worked with the client before. That's one of the common things we're seeing at SALCO.
I know that CIC recognized the problem of phantom consultants when it first contemplated the regulation of immigration consultants, but we feel that more meaningful steps have to be taken to actually address the problem.
The other thing I wanted to say is that we have had a few clients who have wanted to complain about their consultants, but because of the situations they're in and the onerous nature of the process, the long waiting periods to get their complaint addressed, they don't have the means or the time or the energy to pursue those complaints.
We would like whatever process is implemented to be easy for our clients to navigate. As you know, for immigrants, newcomers, people with language barriers, it's asking a lot of them to navigate through a complicated process, especially when they're often living without status or living with very temporary status and need to get moving on things. So that's one thing we would like you to consider as well.
Finally, I wanted to review the main points we wanted to get across.
First, from what we've seen with the clients who have come to us, we believe the immigration forms and processes that exist currently for most applications are very complicated, very onerous, and make it difficult for clients to navigate through. I think this creates a huge dependence on outside help. So we would encourage...and I know when CIC was revising its sponsorship application forms, we had made submissions that the forms needed to be streamlined and made more simple.
The second thing is, of course, what everyone else here is saying, that consultants need to be regulated with a statutorily backed regulation scheme to effectively deal with complaints about immigration consultants.
Finally, start towards a more meaningful crackdown on phantom consultants, including adequate investigation and widening of the mandate of CSIC and legislating controls to increase prosecution under IRPA and by the RCMP. We need to send out a strong message that this kind of conduct is not going to be tolerated, so I think that's really important.
Finally, we just need to remember to acknowledge the context. A lot of immigration consultants are doing fantastic work. We don't want to penalize anybody who is doing fantastic work. Remember that just because someone isn't a lawyer, it doesn't mean they're automatically incompetent.