Thank you for the opportunity to address this honourable committee on some of the issues plaguing the immigration consulting industry in Canada.
As you know, I am a certified Canadian immigration consultant with a local company here in Florenceville, New Brunswick. I am in good standing with the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, which I will refer to as CSIC.
I've been working as an immigration consultant since March 2003. I took the first available CSIC full membership exam and passed at the first attempt. I know you've already heard some of my fellow CSIC members, and I know you have already addressed some of the issues with CSIC itself; however, I decided to come and voice my experience and opinion with you, since I feel that something needs to be done to the present functioning of CSIC.
I'm not before this committee today to destroy CSIC. I am, however, here to advise the committee that CSIC is not fulfilling its mandate as intended by Parliament when it was created.
Why would I say this, as a member of this organization? The CSIC initiative is suffering greatly due to actions and decisions taken by the initial board. The initial directors have not delivered the self-governing profession, as was their task. CSIC has denied members their rightful role in the society. The go-it-alone attitude of the board is, in my view, destroying this profession.
Members have questioned many board decisions without success. The board may have lost our confidence, but members have no tools to hold the board accountable now or in the foreseeable future. The initial directors have arranged things so as to deny all normal mechanisms of accountability to CSIC members.
What is needed now is radical intervention by a third party. Intervention is necessary to compel the current directors to either establish a democratic organization, as was intended by cabinet, or step down.
My hope is that the members collectively may be able to rescue the society from the excess of the first four years and chart a more sustainable future for CSIC. If the current directors are not prepared to provide members their rightful role, they should be removed and replaced.
Please do realize that I could lose my CSIC membership by speaking to you today and criticizing the CSIC board.
For several years I've been concerned about the high cost of running the operation. For example, for rent, from the beginning, the board of CSIC arranged for office space in a very expensive location at a rental cost of over $233,000 a year. This was a time when there were no members, and they committed to a ten-year lease. They could have rented anywhere in the greater Toronto area. But there was nothing the members could do about it, because for three years there were no full members besides the directors, so the directors had the right to make all decisions.
Members were concerned about the high cost, and in October 2006 a group of concerned members wrote a petition to the board requesting a special meeting to discuss several issues faced by the members. This was ignored by the board.
Those on the board of directors have paid themselves a handsome salary, plus benefits, which I believe will be more than $700,000 this year. There is little transparency, but the members have never been permitted a look inside the directors' compensation amount. I am concerned about both their fees and their expenses.
CBC News had already reported this, on November 24, 2005, and December 14, 2005, and CIC did an investigative audit, but the board would not release the report to the members.
The board approves its own expenses without member input. The expenses incurred by directors are very high, as well. In the past years, for instance, CSIC has paid for trips to China, Australia, and England. We have received announcements of international travel to China by the chairperson, John Ryan, and board member Alfred Wong, and trips to Australia and New Zealand by John Ryan and Ross Eastley. The chair and the vice-chair have each taken a $12,000 course to learn how to be a director, at the members' expense.
Members feel that these kinds of expenses are excessive, especially when there is no finance committee of members to oversee them.
Members are charged unreasonable annual membership fees and additional fees to attend mandatory continuous professional development. They call it CPD.
It appears that CSIC is in need of money. This might be why CSIC allocated greater CPD points to its own program and significantly reduced the CPD points for other educational programs with greater value and content than that of CSIC. Programs with similar or better content organized by other organizations, such as the Canadian Association of Professional Immigration Consultants, and by the Canadian Bar Association charge significantly less than CSIC programs.
CSIC forced us to come to a mandatory educational event in May 2007. CSIC has members worldwide, and not all are able to travel to Toronto. For me, it is a heavy burden. I have to fly to Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Vancouver, Montreal, and so on, in order to attend any meetings that might give me CPD points.
I attended one of these events in Toronto recently. It cost me $535 for my ticket, $367 for my hotel, and....
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