Good morning. Thank you for inviting us.
Briefly, the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes is a coalition of 137 member organizations throughout Quebec. Collectively, we have over 35 years of experience in services on the ground, and of knowledge of the problems, the legislation, amendments, regulations, policies and operations, and, as an official said, ways of doing things, sometimes. I will come back to that later.
Individually and collectively, we support the position of the Canadian Council for Refugees. I therefore do not want to repeat everything Ms. Dench has said. However, I can tell you that in my years of experience I have spoken with virtually every minister of immigration, over 20 in the last 30 years. Too often—not always—the words are the same, year after year: front door, back door, false refugees, false claimants, everything that discredits refugee claimants.
The term “false claimants” is a very unfortunate term, because a person can sincerely believe they have a case and be refused. You can be the victim of violence and not fall within the definition. Some people come here before the headlines. We saw that, going back to the time when Mr. Bissett was in the department, with the Salvadoreans, the Guatemalans. The Sri Lankans came before the headlines. When the Sri Lankan Tamils were really victims of persecution and came in the eighties, we didn't know why they were coming because we thought Sri Lanka was a democratic country and part of the Colombo Plan. Well, we learned. So sometimes it's the refugees who bring the story.
I will just say that the 1951 convention, which Canada only signed onto 40 years ago--but we're proud of that and we're celebrating the 40th anniversary--was partly the result of a total absence of protection for Jews and Roma and many others during the Second World War and the Holocaust. The convention came into being to try to prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work.
We have to be careful with our vocabulary. It's a catch-22 to try to speed up a process to match the resources rather than to concentrate on what resources and what places you need, what types of resources, at what point, and an analysis of what really happens, as opposed to the types and numbers of processes that are being bandied about. They vary from speaker to speaker and from minister to minister. I'm not blaming the ministers; they're given the information.
I would suggest, as one of the previous speakers said, that you need good statistics. You need to see how many people are really going through how many processes, what the real story is. You need to look at why the accelerated, expedited process is being used so little at the Immigration and Refugee Board. We only have about 10% of the cases being accepted at that level. Only 65% of people actually go to leave to appeal. Of those, how many go on to make H and Cs? I hope you have the statistics; it would be good to have them.
The resources and the implementation of certain processes are not included in the Act and never will be. The question is therefore: why do things get bogged down at some points? It is a matter of resources and the will to do it, and sometimes a matter of bureaucracy. There is no appeal.
There is no appeal. As we speak, anyone who tells you there is an appeal on the merits, it's not the case. It's mistaken. A very minuscule number, as our previous speaker said, are referred back to the Immigration and Refugee Board. That is costly; that is not effective. It could be prevented if you had an appeal.
No system is infallible, and this we need to repeat as often as we have to. Mistakes are made even by experts, and that's why even for traffic tickets and taxes and drunk drivers, you have an appeal.
It is trite to reiterate that this is a matter of life and death.
Almost is not good enough. The fact that we helped x number of people will never justify sending even one person back to torture or death or imprisonment. I think we also need to remember that the resource exchange was made with the IRPA. We went down and the NGO community agreed to reduce the panel from two to one because we were mindful of resources, one member of the first hearing in exchange for an appeal. So we went down to one member and we never got the appeal. This is forgotten. Now we're talking about this as if nothing was ever sacrificed for the appeal, and there was a sacrifice. Now we're stuck with one member, no appeal.
The institutional memory of everything that's happened, unfortunately, sometimes lies with the community organizations, and it's nobody's fault.
Members of Parliament join the committee, but they leave. You have a lot of goodwill, you have expertise, but next year you may not be here. Some people who were here no longer are. The same is true in the Department: most people there were not there 10 years ago. And so we are the only ones with this expertise.
I think an investment in the hearing and appeal would have been much more fair and cost-effective in 1989 when my learned colleague was the director of immigration. We have to remember that in 1989 there were two levels. There was a credible basis to have a case heard, which supposedly screened people who didn't have a credible base. Over 90% of those cases went through to a second level of a full hearing. Now, that's not efficient.
I'm not trying to tell you to go back to the good old days, but all the way back then we could have had a two-level system at the time, which would have been more cost-effective, 20 years ago. The agency doesn't prevent removal. As we said, the PRI is not an appeal. It was designed to be post-appeal. The PRA....
The PRRA was after the appeal.
To finish, I make two points. Everyone is complaining that only 10% of the Mexicans are accepted. Well, let's remember that 10% of several thousand people is hundreds of people. Hundreds of people need our protection from a country like Mexico, where some people perceive there to be no problems. We would submit that there are.
I would finish with this point, Mr. Chair. The NGO community has an enormous amount of experience and expertise. We've seen what works. We've seen what doesn't work. We all want the same thing. We want refugees to get speedy protection. We want those who don't need our protection to have a speedy determination, but we will not sacrifice the safeguards that are needed to make sure that no one is mistakenly refused. I think we have to remember what the UNHCR says in this booklet, which you can get from the representative who is here, that there is no such thing as a safe country. Any country can produce refugees. We have to be careful not to decide that it's not possible to be a refugee from certain countries.
I would really beg you to include in your recommendations that the NGO community be included in discussion pre-legislation, to offer our expertise. Once the legislation is on the books, it's a little bit late. We have a lot to offer. We are offering you, mostly for free, our advice and our expertise and all the grey hairs that have come from being involved with this issue for such a long time.