Citizenship and Immigration Committee on June 1st, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, meeting 22, Tuesday, June 1, 2010. The orders of the day concern Bill C-11, an act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Courts Act.

This afternoon had originally been scheduled for the committee to review the different clauses in the bill, the clause-by-clause consideration.

We have before us members of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. I won't introduce them--they've been here so many times--but they are here to offer assistance to the committee on anything that you may wish to pose to them.

As you know, the bells are going to ring at 5:15, so the meeting will end then.

As I understand it, Mr. Dykstra, it's unanimous that we will not proceed with clause-by-clause at this particular time and that members of the committee will have an opportunity to ask the staff questions.

Is that a correct assumption?

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

It is, Chair. There has been agreement with the four parties that there are some questions, I guess from a technical perspective, that members would like to ask. We've agreed that we will be proceeding, and completing clause-by-clause as we had agreed to with respect to Thursday at 11:59, but that we use this time, or at least some of this time, to allow for all of us to be able to clarify issues that we feel are pertinent from a party perspective as amendments that were put forward but also, probably more importantly, technical issues that need to be responded to.

We have four individuals from the ministry who are more than capable to be able to respond to those questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Dykstra.

Now, with regard to people debating and discussing, do I assume that there's no rule on time limits?

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Only that we respect each other's time and not--

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I love respect.

First question, Monsieur St-Cyr.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

it is not a question. Without limiting the time allowed for questions, we could spend the first hour to study the government amendments--G-3, G-4, G-5 and the others that were recently submitted and that we did not have time to look at--and the second hour to study the transition provisions that were not really discussed during our meetings. I believe that the best procedure would be for us to get a brief presentation of those provisions. Then, we might ask questions which would be mostly technical. If we have no questions, we do not ask any and we do not start a political debate.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

The reason I asked that question about time limits is that obviously I need guidance. Someone could talk for an hour and three-quarters.

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

Perhaps I could suggest that we go with a time limit of 10 minutes. If that's workable, then at least we have something for you to be guided by.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

There is no unanimous consent.

Questions of the staff...

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Chair, would it make sense to actually do it systematically and go through the amendments, starting with the government's amendments? It's long and involved, and it's detailed--

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

You know, this is rather unusual. I thought we were having a clause-by-clause discussion and were going to start at the beginning of the bill and go through and approve clauses where there are no amendments and debate those clauses where there are amendments.

I'll do whatever you people have agreed to, but at this particular point, my understanding from Mr. Dykstra—I also spoke to Mr. Bevilacqua and Monsieur St-Cyr before the meeting commenced—was that members of the committee would be asking questions on probably the government amendments.

Was that the understanding?

So I'll do whatever you want to do, but someone has to tell me what you want to do.

Mr. Bevilacqua.

[Maurizio Bevilacqua, Liberal, Vaughan, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I think the genesis of this decision was that members, I believe on both sides of the House, wanted to have greater clarification on the significance of various amendments. We felt it would be wise for us to use the next couple of hours to ask questions and get a broad sense of direction.

In particular, in the first half, I think we'd like to hear from the officials on the impact of the various government amendments—what they mean, what their impact is on the system, what their impact is on refugee claimants—so that we can get a better understanding.

Going through these amendments, we have found that they have a lot of information packed into them, but we sometimes fail to understand their overall impact, specifically on people, which is really what this legislation is all about—trying to improve the system, but ultimately to protect and wherever possible expand the rights of individuals while having a timely and efficient refugee system.

This is where we are. We'd like to hear from the officials.

We can begin, I guess, with amendment G-3 and have them give us an overview of what it means, both from a system point of view and as to the individual person applying for refugee status here in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Amendment G-3 is on page 24 in your package, if you're following along. There's a package of amendments that may even have been on your desk when you arrived. If not, you got it yesterday.

Mr. MacDougall.

[Peter MacDougall, Director General, Refugees, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

This package of amendments, G-3 through G-12, concerns the transfer of the pre-risk removal assessment from CIC to the IRB. I'll give an overview of the thinking behind or the rationale for the transfer, and then we can get into some specific questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Okay.

We're going to start with questions. Someone has to ask Mr. MacDougall a question.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I just want to put my name on the list so that I can ask questions when he's finished.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I think he is finished.

[Peter MacDougall]

No, I'm going to give you a quick overview.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Oh, I'm sorry. There was a pause there, Mr. MacDougall.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Peter MacDougall]

I saw Mr. Karygiannis signalling.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

All right. You proceed, sir.

[Peter MacDougall]

The rationale behind the transfer of risk is essentially based on rationalizing the assessment of risk into one organization. As some of you will recall, this was raised by the standing committee report in 2007, which recommended the transfer of the PRRA function to the IRB. We believe it will realize greater efficiencies; we think decisions will be faster and more efficient.

The reasons for that are the following. The current decision-making model at CIC relies on a single officer doing a tremendous amount of work, from preparation of the file to his or her own research and finally to the decision-making process. Moving this PRRA function to the IRB, whose core business is of course individualized risk assessments, would mean making the same types of decisions, but making them in a way similar to that for a risk decision. Decision-makers at the IRB will be simply making decisions. All the registry work, the research, the analysis, will be done by lower-level officers, and obviously will be focused on decision-making. I can't get into precise numbers, but we believe that it will be substantially faster and that the productivity rate at the IRB will be significantly higher than it is at CIC, for the reasons I outlined.

In terms of the specific amendments, as I said, they've been broken into G-3 through G-12. They are, I agree with Mr. Bevilacqua, very lengthy and very technical.

At this point, I think I'll stop. We can take some questions on some of the specifics.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Bevilacqua.

[Maurizio Bevilacqua, Liberal, Vaughan, ON]

Actually, it's Mr. Karygiannis.