Thank you very much.
Bill C-11 is entitled the Balanced Refugee Reform Act. It supposedly balances improved protection for refugees with enhanced prevention of abuse.
For the bill to realize its aim of balance, five requirements must be met: one, there must be a need to improve protection for refugees; two, the bill must be effective in improving that protection; three, there must be a need to enhance prevention of abuse; four, the bill must be effective to enhance that prevention; and five, improved protection for refugees and enhanced prevention of abuse must be roughly equivalent, balancing each other out.
Does the bill meet these five requirements? It certainly meets the first. There is indeed a need to improve protection for refugees, because now there's no appeal system and there needs to be one.
Does the bill remedy that defect? The answer is, only partially. The bill does allow for the appeal division of the board to come into effect, but there are three problems. One is that not every refused claimant can appeal; those from designated countries cannot. Secondly, even for claimants not from designated countries, there is a two-year lag potential in the proclamation of the provisions about the appeal. Thirdly, the system weakens protections in other areas by the partial elimination of recourse to humanitarian applications, temporary residence permits, and pre-removal risk assessment.
As to the third question, is there abuse of the system that needs addressing? In my view, the system is too long. There are delays, and whether those delays are the result of abuse or not, we needn't determine, because long delays are in the interest of no one, genuine refugees as well as the system itself, of course.
Is the bill effective in removing delays? In principle, there are two causes for delays. One is fragmentation of the system. Each step takes time. If there are too many steps, that means too much time. If there are unnecessary steps, time is wasted. The present bill does not address this cause of delay. Right now, the system has two unnecessary steps—eligibility determination and pre-removal risk assessment—but they still remain. That is not to say that eligibility and pre-removal risk assessment are irrelevant, but it's important to distinguish between steps and standards. Not every different standard needs a different step. Eligibility determinations could be made by the board as matters of exclusion or jurisdiction. Pre-removal risk assessment could also be made by the board on a reopening application.
What the bill does, actually, is introduce a new step, these interviews, which are going to generate more time to the system. We've heard discussions about eight days and 60 days—eight days for the interviews and 60 days for the hearings of the board after the interviews—but this discussion has an air of unreality about it. First of all, neither the government nor the minister decides these times; only the chair of the board does, as a matter of the rules. Secondly, the fact of the matter is that the times can only be realized if they're workable. Having an interview eight days after the matter gets to the offices of the board is not workable either for the claimant or for the board. Indeed we've had a history of legislated times in the system that simply do not get realized because they are unworkable.
Take, for instance, the three-day rule, which says there must be eligibility determination within three days of a claim. The fact of the matter is that the three-day rule is almost never respected for inland claims, and the way it's respected in form is that the three-day clock starts ticking from when the officers are able to meet the three days. That is the practicality of what will happen with the interview.
Unless we have new resources, resources will have to be diverted from existing tasks to complete the interview task. How much the new step will add to the overall time of the process is speculative, but it's likely to be substantial.
One step that does not cause delays, but which the authors of the bill seem to think does, is an application for permanent residence on humanitarian grounds or a temporary residence permit, as a result of which there's a restriction on applications for these procedures that in fact does nothing to shorten removal because removal is possible now pending these procedures.
The other cause of delay besides unnecessary steps is backlogs. If the system gets overwhelmed, there is queuing. The backlog problem is not necessarily an abuse problem; it's a matter of claimants relative to capacity.
There are two explanations for the current backlog. One is the change in the appointments process from the old government to the new government and nobody being appointed for a couple of years until the appointment system was changed, and that generated a long backlog. We're now back at full complement, but that backlog is still there. The other is the claims from the Czech Republic and Mexico before visas were implemented. But now the visas are there, so those delays will eventually disappear.
The bill authors seem to be of the view that by speeding up the system they can lift visas from the Czech Republic and Mexico and perhaps other countries. In my view, that is unrealistic. Any time that is so short as to deter people from coming from non-visa countries, there is going to be a claims system that will not be effective to protect real refugees.
The bill fails on the test of balance on its own terms because of the staging of implementation: the enforcement measures, the decrease in access to humanitarian temporary resident permit applications comes into force immediately, and the appeal division of the Immigration and Refugee Board comes into force potentially two years later.
But the problems are more acute than that. Because we have a weakening of protection, a denial of access to a number of procedures that are now available, we have in balance a system where we've moved one step forward with the appeal division of the Immigration and Refugee Board and two steps backward. The net result is—