That is a very good reminder, Mr. Telegdi.
Listening to your various presentations, I heard a lot of self-congratulations. All the organizations you represent are intimately linked to the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, the creation of which is due to CAPIC. You also stated that the Canadian Migration Institute is an independent organization, which is not the case. It is a creation of the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants and the same people sit on both boards.
I find it hard to understand your presentation, Mr. Perrault. You said that one cannot expect the same degree of transparency from that organization since its purpose is to pass regulations and to monitor. Then, at the end, you said that we should trust the ability of the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants to regulate itself.
If a professional organization wants to self-regulate, absolute transparency and maximum democracy are required. I can say that because I too am a member of a professional association, l'Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec. I have presided at elections and I know very well how it works. All the candidates have distribution lists and they can send mass e-mails to all the members in one shot. Of course, one cannot talk by phone to thousands of members. In any case, the list of engineers, as is the case with all professional organizations, is available on the web with their contact information. This is also useful to the public if someone wants to check that someone claiming to be a member of the Association is indeed one. However, that cannot be done if you cannot get that information from the website.
You also underlined the rather important matter of language tests, which nobody is challenging. You also said that, if some people are speaking against the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, it is because they have not been able to pass the language tests. That is not what the committee has heard. The people who criticized the Society or raised various issues before the Committe were all, or nearly all, members of the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants. They were persons who were quite fluent in English, who had obviously passed all the tests of the CSIC but who wanted to criticize its governance.
From what I have heard, from the questions I have asked and the answers I have been given, I can hardly look at you through rose-colored glasses and state that the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants does not have any governance problems. When a professional association has been unable for several years to hold a general assembly, when the assembly it finally holds is not one that people can attend individually, when the members do not have any possibility to call for a special general assembly, and when the same problems and issues are raised continually, that association definitely has governance problems, let us be frank about it.
What is the cause of that situation? That is what I want to know and what is of interest to me. I believe that, right from the start, the creation of that organization as been a problem. The Canadian Society of immigration consultants has been set up at the wrong level of government. All professional organizations in Canada are created at the provincial level with very specific and detailed legislative frameworks. Furthermore, they come under monitoring bodies having the power to discipline their members. Even if one accepts that an organization should regulate itself, it must still come under the control of an external body. Nothing of the sort exists at the federal level. The regulatory framework applying to the CSIC is but a few paragraphs long and, for the rest, it is supposed to regulate itself.
Do you not think that it would be more effective to have the profession regulated at the provincial level the same way it is done with other professions? Why should you, against all logic, keep insisting on the creation of a regulatory framework of this profession from scratch at the federal level?