I'm here today, ladies and gentlemen, to give you the perspective of the Law Society of Upper Canada with respect to the regulation of immigration consultants.
We were founded in 1797, and we're the oldest regulating authority in Canada. Of course, in fact we predate Canada. We are a creature of statute; in fact, we were created by statute in 1797. That's really going to be the essence of my remarks here today.
The problem with the regulatory model that was put into place by Citizenship and Immigration Canada is that it was really an exercise in expediency to create a regulator quickly, without statutory authority.
CSIC was a creation of Citizenship and Immigration. It agreed to fund CSIC for the first two years. It agreed to pass a regulation that would restrict the ability of immigration consultants to appear unless they were members of CSIC. The regulation also exempted lawyers and members of the Chambre des notaires.
Now we, the law society, when this regulation was first proposed in 2003, pointed out to the department that this whole model was flawed and would ultimately fail. I think—just listening to the comments that have been made here this morning—that most of those comments are enumerated in the letter I wrote to the department in January 2004. I have that letter here today, if anyone is interested in looking at it.
Despite the concerns we raised, the department went ahead and passed the regulation and in effect validated CSIC. Now, I'm not casting any aspersions at all on the motives of CSIC itself. What I'm saying is that the organization can't function in the legislative architecture that's been created here by the government.
You've got to go back to square one and redo it. You need to redo it in conjunction with each of the provinces. Across the country we all regulate legal services, as law societies and as the Chambre des notaires. We need to sit down and reconstruct a proper statutory model.
We've just gone through this. In the last year, our authority in Ontario was increased to regulate paralegals. So we are now regulating 2,000 paralegals, in addition to 38,000-odd lawyers. So we actually have some very on-the-ground experience with how you need to go about this and what you need.
But as I listened to the other speakers this morning, and being aware myself of some of the challenges that are being faced in this area, I find the problem quite simple. You can't think you're going to regulate immigration consultants through a voluntary private corporation. You're going to have to create a statutory model, a proper one with an authorized statute from Parliament, so you can prosecute, investigate, and—as was indicated here—not only deal with the competency side but also deal with the enforcement side. Clearly that's where you've got a significant problem.
That's the essence of my remarks, Chairman.