Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Feb. 14th, 2012

[Les Linklater]

No, I don't. We have to verify that.

[Claudette Deschênes]

We could get back in terms of how much it is going to cost to do this first rollout.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

The reason I'm asking is we're probably entering an era where the database will be so tremendously large. It's something that has to do with privacy issues, it has something to do with archives, and it has something to do with the cost of securing our borders. I just want to have a handle on that. That's the reason for my question.

[Claudette Deschênes]

Right.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

How much time do I have, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I think you've had it.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

But I'm going to ask a question. My question is on the percentage of applications that are denied for security reasons.

[Pierre Sabourin]

I believe we get about 1.7 million visa applications. I'll let CIC answer that.

In CBSA we receive, from an admissibility perspective, roughly 76,000 security screening requests from visa officers abroad. Last year we gave approximately 650 recommendations in terms of security screening, of not letting these people into the country. So it's a very small number of individuals, versus the total number of people who get visas, and it's an even smaller number versus the 93 million who come into the country.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Ms. Sitsabaiesan.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Thank you.

Madame Deschênes, I think you mentioned earlier in a response that by 2013 we'll be introducing biometric requirements to certain nationalities. Can you expand a little bit as to which nationalities are going to have biometric requirements before the others? And how do you identify those nationalities?

[Claudette Deschênes]

I can't give you too much precision on that yet. We're still in the planning stage for the biometrics project.

But we know that to roll out a project like this—and I would call it a big bang to try to do everybody at the same time—it doesn't necessarily work very well. We have experience with the global case management, where we tried to do too much and it took a little longer.

From an operational perspective, we're hoping to target a few places, test the model, and then go from there.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Okay.

I'm going to switch gears a little bit. I'm a new member of Parliament. Since becoming an MP, many of my constituents come into my office looking for help with visitor visa applications. In my riding, particularly, I have constituents who are applying to the Colombo visa office. We know that the Colombo visa office has an extremely high rate of refusal. People are confused about their rejection because they have a good job, they have family back home, in many cases they've travelled to Canada before, and yet they're denied. And the refusal letter they actually get is very vague and unclear as to why they're denied.

Can you explain why this might be happening? What can I tell my constituents?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Having served in Colombo, I can say that I didn't see too many cases fitting that profile that actually were refused, but I'll take your point that this is happening.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Times have changed.

[Claudette Deschênes]

That's right. At the end of the day, people are refused visitor visas because we are concerned about the bona fides of the application. It could be for security or criminality, or it could simply be that we're concerned that if they come to Canada, they will not leave Canada. For that reason, they are refused. That's the major reason.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

I guess proving that they have family or a job and property back home and that they've successfully come to Canada, the U.S., or the U.K. and returned is not good enough any more.

[Claudette Deschênes]

If you have cases like that—

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

I've had many cases like that.

[Claudette Deschênes]

—I'd be glad to hear about them.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

I have many cases like that. We'll talk about that later, I guess.

I note that the final decision for visas rests with the visa officers abroad. If we have visas granted by the visa officers for people who are inadmissible and visas not being granted for people like the many examples I talked about right now, then what are we doing about the accountability of our visa officers abroad?

We do know that some of them are contracted and are not Canadians.

[Claudette Deschênes]

Yes. We have locally engaged decision-makers, and I think we look very closely at the quality of the work they do.

Certainly one of the mechanisms we always look at is the issue of cases that go to court where the decision is overturned, which I would say is the minority of cases. Certainly with global case management, we believe we would be more able to integrate our view of the performance and look at the decisions that are taken.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

When the decisions are made by the visa officers, who reviews the decisions that are made by a specific officer or visa centre?

[Claudette Deschênes]

Nobody specifically reviews every case. Certainly quality assurance work is done, which is looking.... We're strengthening our model to ensure that we can look at cases that are accepted and refused and make sure that we're comfortable. We won't do all of them, but we'll do them in a systematic and a statistically valuable way.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Sure.