Thank you very much.
My name is Avvy Go. I'm the clinic director of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, which is a clinic providing free legal services to low-income immigrants and refugees from the Toronto area's Chinese and Southeast Asian communities.
I had the honour of presenting previously on a number of occasions in front of this committee, and I would like to thank you for again providing me the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. In my 10-minute presentation I will focus on family class sponsorship applications and the related agency applications.
I will begin with some general observations, followed by some comments about the delays we have seen as a clinic. Then I'll talk about what we think some of the causes are for the delays and our recommendations for change.
For more than a decade, family class immigrants have taken a back seat to other classes of immigration as the Canadian government took in more and more independent and business class immigrants to Canada.
With an ever-increasing number of people accepted under the temporary foreign workers program over the last two years, family class immigrants have to compete for processing resources with an even greater number of potential applicants. At the same time, restrictive legislative changes and arbitrary decision-making by immigration officers have made family reunification ever more difficult, if not impossible. Interestingly, while the minister of immigration is concerned enough about speeding up the refugee process to introduce legislative reform to the refugee determination system, the government does not appear to have the same sense of urgency around the unacceptably slow processing time for family class immigrants.
Delays in family class processing occur in both overseas and inland applications. With respect to overseas applications, the delays are particularly severe for Canadians who want to sponsor their parents and non-dependent children, whose cases can often take multiple years, sometimes as long as ten years, to process.
Even though the processing time of overseas spousal sponsorships is faster, delays can still happen, especially if the applications have initially been denied and have to be appealed to the Immigration Appeal Division, which could take years to complete. Also, there is no time limit imposed once the file is sent back to the visa office for reconsideration after a successful appeal.
With respect to inland spousal sponsorship applications, the application time after it has been transferred to the local office is, in our experience, about two and a half to three years. Within that period, the sponsored spouse is often not able to work and does not have any access to public health care, which could cause a huge financial burden on the family.
Then there are those applications that are submitted on H and C grounds by individuals who have close family ties in Canada and who are deemed ineligible to be sponsored. Assuming that their H and C cases are approved, it could take three to four years for the cases to be finalized.
To reduce wait time for family class and related H and C applications, we recommend the following.
First, resources in visa offices should be reallocated from processing temporary foreign workers and independent class immigrants to family class immigration applications, including those filed under H and C grounds.
Second, there should be increased resources for local CIC offices to process inland spousal sponsorship cases and agency cases.
Turning now to causes for delays, I'll focus on three particular areas.
First, we are extremely concerned about the proposed changes to the bad faith provision under the immigration and refugee protection regulations. Under the new proposal, section 4 of the regulations will be amended such that the mere fact that one of the purposes of the marriage was to acquire status under the act is sufficient to support a finding of bad faith. Parallel changes are also proposed for sponsorships of adopted children.
Even under the current system, it appears that many visa officers often deny family class and genuine family sponsorship cases because the officers see their role more as screening out undesirable immigrants than as facilitating family reunification.
There appears to be an unwritten presumption that all spousal sponsorship applications, particularly those from the global south, are bad faith unless proven otherwise. If the proposed regulation goes through, more genuine applications will be denied. With more refusals at the first instance, more cases will have to be appealed, which will then result in longer processing time for those who are in genuine relationships. So in our recommendation, we urge the government not to amend the bad faith clause of the regulations and to maintain the current two-pronged test.
Secondly, the financial requirement for sponsorship is also a factor causing delays. Because of this requirement, many low-income Canadians are barred from being reunited with their loved ones. While the sponsor can appeal the refusal on equitable grounds, the reunification will not take place until years after the application is first submitted, assuming the appeal is successful. We therefore recommend that the minimum income requirement, including the ban on sponsorship due to being a social assistance recipient, be removed.
Another barrier to family reunification is paragraph 117(9)(d) of the regulations, which bars Canadians from sponsoring non-declared family members. At our clinic we have seen many parents barred from bringing their children to Canada because of this provision. Dependent children are sometimes not declared in the original applications for various reasons. In the case of China, we have seen that many parents do not declare their children for fear of being penalized by the Chinese government for having violated the one-child policy. A number of paragraph 117(9)(d) cases came about simply because of bad advice given by immigration consultants, even though the inclusion of the dependent child would in fact not have affected the initial eligibility of the sponsor to become a landed immigrant.
Not only does the non-declaration result in the subsequent exclusion of the child from entering Canada, but it may actually lead to the removal of the sponsor based on grounds of misrepresentation. In our respectful view, the initial errors made by the sponsors simply do not justify the extremely harsh consequences that are being visited upon them while little is being done to penalize the consultants whose wrong advice was the cause of the non-declaration in the first place. We would therefore recommend that paragraph 117(9)(d) of the regs be repealed. Alternatively, we recommend that the Immigration Appeal Division be given the power to allow appeals on equitable grounds.
In conclusion, family reunification still is a core principle of Canadian immigration legislation. Reducing family class application wait times must become a priority for the Canadian government. This can only be achieved by investing adequate resources to process family class applications and introducing legislative amendments to remove all unreasonable and restrictive barriers to family class sponsorship.
Finally, I would like to end, since I have the floor here, by urging the committee to hold a public hearing into Bill C-11, because this is an issue that potentially will have an implication for the wait times for eventual family class members who are members of the refugee class as well.
Thank you.