Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 30th, 2010

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

Perhaps that can be tabled at the committee.

[Claudette Deschênes]

As long as it's tabled in the context that we set them and we change them through the year.

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

Yes. I totally understand.

But once you hit the target—let's say in New Delhi the target is something like 13,000 for the entire family class—and you estimate how many staff you need, even though you have many more as a backlog, you don't continue. You don't all of a sudden tomorrow say you'll process 25,000 family class applicants from New Delhi. Even if you have the resources, you wouldn't do that.

[Claudette Deschênes]

Normally the level or the operational target we give is based on the distribution of every category in every mission and the staff we have. So we look at New Delhi and we say they have this much backlog in this group; we know family class one, so spouses--

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

So would you stop the applications if you hit the target?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Targets are set on visas issued. Levels are based on admissions. So we always overshoot how many we want to arrive.

Am I going to tell you that any manager would have followed my word and said to keep going, or some have stopped because they feel that they've done the year and they'll start again? I don't think anybody normally meets the target until October, November, or December, and normally it's not a matter.... They stop, but they then put their resources back into the first steps. Rather than finishing the file, they might put more cases into an interview queue and that type of thing.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Excuse me. I just want to make sure you've undertaken to provide us with those targets, those caps.

[A voice]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Sorry, Ms. Chow. Thank you.

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

So let's say you're finished by August--

[Claudette Deschênes]

It has never happened. I wish.

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

All right. I was just being optimistic.

So the targets are really set according to how many staff you have. But if tomorrow we say that we want the target in New Delhi to be 20,000 family class applicants rather than 12,700, you would get extra staff, if it fits there, to decrease the wait times, etc. That is certainly doable, right?

[Claudette Deschênes]

As long as it fits the overall--

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

That's right. Then the family class application would have to be bigger. The numbers would have to be bigger overall, etc. It would have to go maybe over 265,000 or whatever, but it's certainly doable.

[Claudette Deschênes]

I'll just note that the operational targets are also based not only on the staff we have and the movement and all other things, but also possible additional money to put into temporary duty. So many of the missions, and the bigger missions, also need temporary duty to help them to attain those, because we know there's a big backlog and we want to clear as much as we can, and we try as much as we can to keep all things equal, but some cases are much harder to process than others.

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

I understand.

It will take you a year or two to get the sponsorship approved, and then you interview the applicants. So why not tell people it's a two-step process and you don't need to pay for the second step--that is, pay for the applicant's piece--until you get to that?

Right now, what's happening is that the sponsors put in the application and they come to the MP's office and say, “I've been waiting for a year. My father hasn't even had an interview yet, and the medicals, etc. ” Why not be very clear that it will take at least a year before we've even finished with the sponsorship examination?

[Claudette Deschênes]

I'll pass it to my colleague, who was formerly a senior counsel.

[Dawn Edlund, Acting Associate Assistant Deputy Minister, Operations, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Thank you.

At the moment, our global processing time for family class, close family class, is 13 months, including sponsorship and--

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

I'm talking about Asia, actually--Hong Kong, New Delhi. For Islamabad and New Delhi, it's pretty long.

[Dawn Edlund]

On the question of whether we should consider splitting the fee into sponsorship separately from the actual right of permanent residency, for example--

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

Otherwise you could tell the applicants.

[Dawn Edlund]

Well, applicants now have a great deal of information on the web in terms of processing times, particularly since we've added new material to the web. It tells you precisely the processing times in each location around the globe for each category of immigration application.

In terms of splitting the fee from what we currently do, that's actually under litigation before the Federal Court right now, so we're not really able to talk about it.

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

Never mind. Okay.

Let me go to another area, then.

I'm looking at the Hong Kong spouses, partners, and children. It can't be true that 62% of them are fraudulent. How many cases actually end up winning at the immigration appeal board?

[Claudette Deschênes]

I'm not sure that I have that information. We have just come back from a program managers conference in Hong Kong, where we had a presentation on the Hong Kong family class issues. At this moment, I don't believe we're losing a lot of those cases.

Again, as I've mentioned before here, it's a new issue in Hong Kong, and it's tied to organized crime.

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

Is there any chance that you could provide a comparison to show that in the last few years the Immigration Appeal Division has approved the following spousal sponsorships from these missions, and therefore these are the lessons we learned from the Immigration Appeal Division? For instance, let's say x percent of them have been rejected, but y percent have been overturned. Surely if there's a pattern of overturning a certain mission's decisions, then there's something wrong with that mission. Do we actually learn from that and--