Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Oct. 18th, 2010

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

Those people who end up being ripped off, for some of them, in fact, it's their entire life savings. They're in debt for years to come. Even the kids might be in debt because they pay somebody a huge amount of money they can barely afford. They borrow it. Then their chance of coming to Canada, probably...if it's done wrong, they end up being stuck.

So it does make sense to have some kind of return. Maybe the rules need to be looked at so that they are fair. You don't want a loophole there, but there should be some kind of cushion.

[Warren Creates]

Well, law societies throughout the country do this every day. You're not reinventing the wheel. It's there. It operates. It's on a cost-recovery basis, based on insurance. Our annual premiums go to that.

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

In terms of moving toward a stand-alone body, which is what this committee recommended earlier, that takes a long time to set up. Should we recommend that.... Of course there shouldn't be any limit. Maybe eventually it will go toward that direction.

Would there be some signpost to say if we're at that stage, then we're ready to have a non-share corporation, the one we're all talking about? What are some of the signposts that say okay, if the industry is at this stage or that stage, then we should take that further step to make it into a professional body?

[Philip Mooney]

Without giving away any specific details of what our bid proposal will be,--

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

Don't do that.

[Philip Mooney]

--it's really incumbent on the process that there be no uncertainty in the market or in the marketplace. It's also clear that if the decision is made to appoint a different body as a regulator, there has to be a transition period. The bid process itself asks for a clear description of a bid process, a transition process, with all of those signposts.

I've been involved in several of those discussions, and I think we've come up with some very palatable signposts. Is that the right way to put it? It's doable.

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

Yes, I get what you mean. It's practical.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Before we get to Mr. Dykstra, I have a brief question to you, Mr. Creates.

All of us as members of Parliament get constituents who come in and say “I gave $10,000 to some guy and he messed up my file”. I'm picking that figure out of the air. It may not be that amount; it may be less, whatever.

Are you suggesting some form of insurance in the same way the law society has?

[Warren Creates]

I can only speak to the law societies, because I'm not familiar with how the consultants are regulated. If there's a complaint, such as what you've said, a law society will investigate negligence but won't issue an order or a judgment of any kind in regard to compensation. That has to be separately....

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I understand. They have to go through the courts.

[Warren Creates]

They have to go through the civil procedure of the courts, yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Dykstra, it's your turn.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks. This has actually been an interesting contrast in terms of presentations. It was good to have you guys sort of back to back to each other.

Mr. Mooney, I wanted to very quickly get your thoughts on the issue Ms. Chow brought up. This process we're undertaking now to choose a new regulator, or at least to go through the process to choose a new regulator.... One of the confusing parts of our last meeting, when we had the ministry staff here, was that we had almost pre-started or predated Bill C-35 through this process. But you didn't, and you aren't, considering in your application and process potentially becoming a regulator under the new legislation. You did so under the current legislation.

[Philip Mooney]

Yes, that is correct.

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

Okay, thank you. I think that's an important clarification to make.

[Philip Mooney]

Absolutely.

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

One of the comments your organization made, in terms of supporting the bill, is that it covers everything in connection with an application or proceeding under IRPA, whereas the former act only included work done after the application was filed.

Could you enlighten us a little bit in terms of why that support is so necessary and why the bill is so correct in addressing this issue?

[Philip Mooney]

Sure.

I think if everyone had a picture in mind of a bad consultant or someone who is out to cheat people, it would be a guy meeting someone in a dark corner of some restaurant in downtown Toronto or Vancouver or Delhi. He would have an individual who had been referred to him by someone else—a brother, a friend, a colleague—and would say, “I can help you come to Canada. I can get you there in six months. I'll fill in all your forms. The right way to do it is to do this, this, and this. You give me these documents. I'll do it all for you. Just give me $5,000.” The applicant then gives the money to that individual, goes away, doesn't hear anything for months and months and months, maybe hears that the application's been filed, gets no feedback as to where that application is, and is told over and over again for a year or two years that the lineups are long and that things are backed up. Eventually it comes out after a few years that the application was never filed. By then the applicant can't find the individual.

Well, unfortunately, everything that individual did under the current legislation was perfectly okay. It wasn't moral, it wasn't ethical, but it was legal, because the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act said who could represent, and the department, in its wisdom, when it put out its bulletin, said that representation starts after an application is filed with the government. So effectively, it did little or nothing.

I'll be honest with you. We were all so busy getting regulated and taking tests and taking our English-language tests—I'm not sure what I would have done if I had failed the test, I would have to have been a sign-language consultant—that we didn't realize until we all became regulated that the discipline, the regulation, all that stuff, only applied to us. We really thought it applied to everybody. Of course it's like reading the fine print on your contract and saying, “oh, darn”. That's when we started to work towards changing that. We were given lots of reasons why it couldn't be changed and then lots of promises that it would be.

We absolutely applaud everyone, and I say this sincerely: the committee who recommended those things and the government that acted on them.

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

I wanted to refer to that, because the report the committee did in 2008 talks about all the issues CSIC faced: the membership fees were too high, the exam was prepared and marked in a questionable way, CSIC failed to develop an industry plan, the board of directors was not accountable to anyone, there was no possibility for CSIC members to call a special meeting of the society, and so on. These were the things the committee heard across the country.

In the report presented by the Canadian Migration Institute, one of the things Imran commented on was that just two months ago they commissioned a survey to determine how CSIC fellows feel about the regulations. The results clearly indicated that the fellows think CSIC is an effective regulator.

You're a member of CSIC. You also have membership. So I guess I'm asking a two-part question. What does your membership think of the current setup?

[Philip Mooney]

Sure. I'm also a member of CMI. It would be silly not to be, because they give us a lot of things for free, or they were free.

In regard to that survey, we participated in a listserv of several hundred professionals who share ideas and solve problems. Unanimously, the individuals came out, and one of the first questions they asked on that survey was whether their identity would be disclosed to the regulator, in terms of the answers to these questions, and the answer was yes.

I personally objected to some of the questions and gave very strenuous answers in opposition to the leading nature of the questions, and I was told at the end that I would be put down as non-responding. Frankly, I wouldn't say this was quite up to Gallup standards. In fact, when they disclosed the results, they inadvertently disclosed the data behind it, and I would leave that with you to say that you would not accept that as a standard in terms of accountability. Frankly, just think about it: we're all members of CMI, we get a lot of things for free, which of course we pay for in our CSIC fees. If you're not a member of CMI you don't get any of it; you have to pay for it yourself. That's why they're almost unanimous in terms of their support.

Then, all of a sudden this year we were told, by the way, it's not free any more. Surprise, surprise. After the million dollars, it's not free, and clearly, we've each paid something like $700 or $800 a year for those services. When they first came out they gave us all these free things. That was in August, September, October 2008, and then remarkably, at the end of October, about two weeks before our annual renewal, we were told that several of those things were now mandatory, that we must have them to continue to practise and to keep our licence. Of course they were all free from CMI, but we had to have them. So your choice was to join CMI or risk losing your membership or pay something like $1,000 to $1,500 in additional fees to buy the resources. And that has continued for the last few years. That's one of the reasons that our association, which was providing some of those things, simply couldn't compete.

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

One of the other questions I had, and this came up in our last meeting as well, is the issue around statutory body and whether or not this would work as a regulatory body. One of the issues, obviously, is the speed upon which we'd like to ensure that we can move forward. We do have other organizations across the country that are in fact run under this type of process that we're suggesting in the bill. Do you feel it's something that at least gives us a good start over the next two to three to four years?

[Philip Mooney]

As I said in the presentation, we believe this is a huge step forward. The question we're asked all the time is what if you change the regulator? How do we know we won't be here in five years, ten years, or twenty years? Well, they don't ask that question about law societies, which are statutory bodies. So that's probably something time will give us the answer to.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Oliphant, please.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Thanks, and I may not take my whole time, actually.

I'm still sorting this out as a new member of the committee. I wasn't in the committee when it did its last report and its report before, and all the way back to 2004, when discussions started on this topic. But as I'm looking at this, I see a life cycle in here.

I just want to get where you see the points of the problem are. You have education, certification, licensing, continuing education, compliance, including policing, governance of the body that's doing all of that, public education, complaints, discipline, and then relations with society, government, and others. So there are all of these factors in here, and I'm seeing certain little holes in various parts of it. If you had to name where you're seeing a weakness in this legislation, where is it along that line?

[Philip Mooney]

Well, the legislation isn't designed to solve all of the problems. It goes a major step along the way toward what individuals are allowed to do if they're in Canada in terms of immigration procedures and practices.

With regard to the regulation, you can have a perfectly designed system; it's how it's implemented. In the first seven or eight things you indicated, about education, accreditation, exams and standards, CSIC has done many of those. I would simply say that the difference in what we feel, as members, is that they've been done in a way not to maximize the effectiveness or the efficiency of the organization, but to maximize the revenues. So it costs us a lot of money to belong and to stay, and that has an impact on the number of members CSIC has removed. Of those members—you heard about the numbers removed—the vast majority were removed because they couldn't afford to pay the fees.

A lot of the individuals who graduate from schools are there to set up their own businesses. Immigration practitioners, on the whole, operate alone. They all come out and they're all operating on somebody else's dime, mostly. Perhaps they have a little capital saved up, and they start their businesses and find out it's not easy.

I was in the corporate world for 40 years, so getting business is the hardest thing you have to do. But when you end up in a situation where your business is developing slowly, and then you get hit with fees and more fees, ultimately you say “Maybe I'm in the wrong business, but I really like this.” We believe a whole lot of them have decided they can actually stay in this business without paying the fees.