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.