Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 18th, 2010

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

So there are none. Okay, that's interesting.

Are they running into problems with their program?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Whenever you set up a new program, it takes a little while to get it all in place. I certainly wouldn't venture to say that. I think it's a challenge for all of us, and we're trying to work together to get things done.

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

That's a fair response to the question.

We've been told on numerous occasions that, based on our accord, the minute we received those applications we would work consistently with Quebec and as quickly as possible. It's kind of hard to do that if we actually haven't seen a single request come from the Government of Quebec on this particular issue.

[Claudette Deschênes]

I would just say that our office in Mississauga, which takes the sponsorships, has 300 family class...one in three, so that's spouses and so on.

I have just received a note saying that 250 cases have been received by MICC, the Quebec government immigration ministry; of those, six or seven passed their initial assessments, and one case is ready to be sent over to CIC. That is the most up-to-date information.

Like everything else, we anticipate over the next few days and weeks and months that we are going to get more of those, but when a new program is set up, it takes a little while.

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

You have done a reasonably good job of defining the fact that they will be processed as a priority.

[Claudette Deschênes]

They will be processed as a priority. We will be focused first on spouses and children, dependent children of the people who have been recognized as refugees. Parents, grandparents, and then cousins and so on will come as the next priority after that.

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

A special CIC unit in Ottawa, as you mentioned a couple of times, has been set up to support the mission in Haiti and is working to identify and expedite existing adoption and family class sponsorship applications. Could you expand a little bit on what the responsibilities are?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Normally when either Vegreville receives a case in which they have dependent children of refugees who are in Haiti or Mississauga has a parent or a spouse sponsorship, all of that gets sent to Port-au-Prince in order to open the file and do the work to get to the interview stage.

In the Ottawa office we do the first part of the work, which is contacting sponsors to get the application forms and doing all of the processing up to the point of deciding whether we need an interview. If we don't need an interview, then they are sent for medicals. All that work is being done in Ottawa so that the officers in Haiti are really focused on interviews and making sure that when the documents are ready, they are in contact with the people to advise them to come to get their documents. We have the same number of officers in Haiti as in the past, but they're not doing a lot of the preliminary work and so on.

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

They do that here. Okay, thank you.

One of the great successes out of this was Operation Stork, and you noted that in less than two months we actually brought 203 children over here. For 2008-09 it was 237, almost the same level.

I understand that approximately 127 children were going to Quebec, 27 to Alberta, 21 to British Columbia, 10 to Saskatchewan, eight to Ontario, six to New Brunswick, two to Manitoba, and two to Nova Scotia. Where are we in terms of the completion of that process? Are there more children? I note that the Haitian government approved 250. Are we going to hit that 250 number? Are we eventually going to exceed it?

Also, could you comment on the process involved for Canadians who have offered to adopt Haitian children, should they need it? How is that process going to unfold over the next number of months?

[Claudette Deschênes]

We don't think we'll hit 250 in this tranche, because when we were trying to get as many approvals as possible, for any name that had been submitted to us we either had a file, or the provincial adoption agencies were telling us about it, or the human resources adoption desk was telling us about it, or we had heard it from someone. We submitted that name to try to get the approval of the Haitian government to let them come, but it was always under the strict understanding that we would not let any child leave Haiti who wasn't already matched with a parent, with someone in Canada, if the Haitian authorities hadn't already moved it forward quite a lot and if the province in Canada had not authorized the adoption.

In the end, there were some people on the list that the Haitian Prime Minister approved who had either not been matched or were not far enough advanced or whose prospective parents had not been authorized by the province to adopt them.

At this moment we don't foresee that the 250 children will come. That doesn't mean that these children won't come later on, when the Haitian government is back up and running and can authorize adoptions in Haiti.

In terms of new children, right now we're not taking any more because the Haitian government is not up and running in terms of adoption.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Madame Deschênes.

Mr. Dykstra, that concludes the seven-minute rounds. We're now on to five-minute rounds.

Mr. Karygiannis.

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

Thank you for coming today.

Can you please tell me how many extra officers you sent to Port-au-Prince or Santo Domingo in order to handle the situation on the ground?

[Claudette Deschênes]

I'll go through this. In terms of temporary duty, 16 CIC officers were sent to Port-au-Prince, totalling, if you count a five-day week—which was not what people were working at the time—it would have been a 62.8 work week—

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

I'm sorry, 16 officers, correct?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Sixteen CIC officers, plus 11 TD officers from the Canada Border Services Agency. Plus, we have three officers from CIC and one from CBSA in Santo Domingo.

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

Thank you.

Is this the first time that we're engaging so many officers to go abroad, or has this been done before?

[Claudette Deschênes]

We've often sent temporary duty officers to do work, either—

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

In cases of emergency, is this the first time that we engaged so many? Or, in the case of the Gujarat earthquake, Bam in Iran, the Sri Lanka tsunami, China, Burma, do we engage?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Normally, we will engage temporary duty officers to go in a crisis when there's a large link to the Canadian population. I can only speak from memory. I can certainly speak here—

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

How many did we send to Sri Lanka? Do you remember?

[Claudette Deschênes]

I don't have that information. But we would have sent for the tsunami.

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

Okay. We've brought in 260 cases, permanent residents--or 160? How many did you say in the last two months?

[Claudette Deschênes]

I think it's 160. Somebody help me.

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

That is 160 in—

[Claudette Deschênes]

One hundred and sixty were issued for permanent residence.