Thank you for inviting us. It is my pleasure to be here on behalf of the CanPak Chamber of Commerce. My name is Shahid Hashmi and I'm the chairman of the CanPak Chamber of Commerce. Tonight I am accompanied by the administrative director, Sohabe Hashmi. I must start by saying I'm thankful to the committee members for their efforts to ensure that the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act will be amended for the better.
Throughout my work in the community I have come across many refugee and immigration cases where I have been puzzled about why the system handles them in such a way. Our initial question is why it takes so long to reach decisions about refugee cases. While the decision is being made, it costs taxpayers an enormous amount of money.
According to the report of the Auditor General, the cost is $100 million a year to the federal government and $100 million a year to the provinces, for social assistance for refugees. With the current backlog, I suspect it to be much higher now.
The general answer I hear is that there is a backlog of cases and the system is unable to handle all the refugee cases. I would argue that the backlog is costing Canadian taxpayers more money than hiring qualified people to handle that backlog. This would create jobs for unemployed Canadians versus giving away unnecessary money to people who may not become assets to Canada or may be abusing the system.
I would also like to question why there are so many different decisions being made in the process. These decisions seem erratic and based on the officials' whims rather than following the system. The level of qualifications and management by the authorities does not meet the requirements of this field, which has the responsibilities of a court judge and court system. Can you imagine if the Canada Revenue Agency or the courts made decisions in the ways mentioned in the Auditor General's report? It indicates the following:
Immigration officers rule on the eligibility of a claim without having obtained the required information. Moreover, the information gathered when the claim is received does not serve adequately at other stages in the process.
I feel this is an ongoing trend in the system, causing processing difficulties. It is costing a vast amount of money, denying people who need help, and letting people slip through the cracks. It is my educated guess that the processing of refugees is relying too much on opinion-based decision-making. If files are not looked at for months and even years, at the time when the information is being passed on to other authorities, the stages and processes will not be done efficiently. If information is reviewed after such a long period of time, it takes a lot of time to re-familiarize with particular cases. If the system of information exchange is not efficient, we create duplicate work, possibly different outcomes for the refugees, and unnecessary increases in processing times.
I would like to share with the committee a case on which Hameed Ahmed and Javed Zaheer worked closely with me. We're puzzled to this day. Although the outcome was good for the refugees, it was an example of the lack of good first decision-making in our system. Farouqe Rashida and Noorunissa Begum applied for refugee status in 2001 on the basis of the threatening domestic violence they faced in India. Their hearing was—