Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Feb. 28th, 2012

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I remember at the beginning of your remarks you mentioned certain parts of the world that tend to produce more terrorists, and I'm only paraphrasing, not quoting here. Are there certain areas of the world that you think we should be cutting immigration from so it's commensurate with available resources?

[Martin Collacott]

In connection with terrorist threats in particular?

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Yes.

[Martin Collacott]

No, not necessarily, but to the extent people do come from these areas, I think we should be particularly careful in our screening. As I mentioned, because of the resource shortages, the deputy director of CSIS said we only screen 10% of the people. So I think if people are going to come from those countries, we have to screen very carefully and we have to look at the situation very carefully.

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Do you think, sir, that if we look back a few years, immigration was too high, and we should have had a lower level so that we checked everybody more carefully? Do you think it should have been 20% lower if we go back the last few years? I'm trying to understand in detail how big an issue this is.

[Martin Collacott]

Sure. Fair enough. If you go back far enough, you can look at the huge intake of immigration in the early twentieth century. We needed large numbers of immigrants; we needed large numbers of unskilled immigrants to fill up the west in particular. Then there were periods when we didn't have much immigration. So you really have to look at the current period.

I'm not sure I grasped your full question. Do you mean should we have taken fewer on security grounds? Could you please amplify it a bit?

[Ted Hsu, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Yes. Should we have taken fewer on security grounds?

[Martin Collacott]

There were certain periods when a lot of terrorist supporters came in, which I mentioned, and I think we should have been considering that more carefully.

Terrorist problems are relatively recent, though; they have only come up in the last 25 years or so.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Ms. James.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome back, Mr. Collacott. I've been doing a bit of research and going through your credentials. There's about a mile long list of them, so you're certainly an expert in this area.

I'm going back to 2007 when you organized a conference on immigration and security. I was reading a little bit about that and some of the conclusions and recommendations you put forth after that conference.

I'm wondering whether you can tell the rest of the committee some of those recommendations, or the conclusions that came out of that specific conference. I believe the conclusions were in a document entitled “Making Canada's Immigration System and Borders More Secure”.

Could you comment on that, with some of the conclusions and recommendations that came out of that, please?

[Martin Collacott]

I'll have to try to refresh myself a bit, but I can pretty well recall what my recommendations were. They were that we do have some security problems; we should be checking people more carefully. We should also be looking at communities where there's more of a risk than in other communities to see why there is a risk.

I mentioned briefly that some of the more radicalized members of the Muslim community—and there is no single Muslim community, it's a mix of different communities—are more radicalized than their parents who came here. I think we need to do some research on this to find out why.

People are rather reluctant to do research into what are sometimes considered to be sticky areas where it involves a particular ethnic or religious group. I think we've got to do a lot more of that and understand why we're having these problems.

We have among the largest per capita immigration inflows in the world. We have a very mixed inflow, which is good in many respects, but we are going to accumulate some major problems if we're not careful.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Mr. Collacott, I'm looking at some of the specific conclusions that came out of that. You touched on it today.

With regard to terrorists who have entered into Canada, you mentioned that two-thirds of them have come from refugee claimants. I noticed when I went back and reviewed some of the information on that conference that you made reference to the refugee determination system and recommended that the appeal process be corrected to ensure removals are done more quickly.

I'm trying to get to the bottom of this. As we're talking about border security, obviously if we could stop people from coming into Canada in the first place, we wouldn't necessarily have these types of problems. Is that a fair statement?

[Martin Collacott]

Yes, that would be one of the solutions to this problem.

Are you talking about stopping people on security grounds or just stopping refugee claimants in general?

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

It's not necessarily refugee claimants. At the conference you also touched on an issue regarding high intake levels in Canada.

It's interesting. Mr. Davies touched on that as well. Some of the questions that were asked tried to tie it into the fact that we do not necessarily have enough resources. But from what I understood from your answers, it's more that there are so many fraudulent applicants that if we had a better screening process in place, we would not necessarily have that problem.

Is that a fair statement as well, that if we had better security screening processes...?

[Martin Collacott]

Those are two separate issues. The fraudulent documents more often than not relate to people's academic qualifications or financial situation rather than security. The security issues are somewhat different in that they relate to whether they are going to be a threat to national security or some related area.

Those are two different problems. They are both problems, but different ones.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you.

In previous sessions we've been trying to figure out—and I think some of the questions came from across the room here today—which countries typically raise a security flag.

From your experience, do you know what countries fall into that category? There are certain countries in the world where the security flag would be raised and we would take more time to look into the backgrounds and review the documents.

[Martin Collacott]

Yes. Certainly I mentioned Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there are others where there are significant security problems or potential terrorist problems. That doesn't mean those are the only ones. You might get a terrorist supporter coming in through a completely different route.

I think there are countries we have to give particular attention to. As Jack Hooper reported, they were only able to screen 10% of those coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I think you can probably list priority countries in terms of security screening, which the Americans have done. They've said we've got to be particularly careful about people coming from X, Y, and Z countries.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Going further with that, we hear about countries in the world where we suspect there's more of a chance of terrorists coming into Canada, but I've actually heard anecdotally that we have received more hits on people raising a security flag through the United States, as opposed to other countries where we might more suspect that to be the case, such as Egypt. Can you comment on that? Is that actually something that's true or is it just a false rumour?

[Martin Collacott]

It may be true. I must say that I haven't come across that particular one.

We do have a lot of people coming in from the States, though, and one of the problems we face is that we get a lot of what are called offshore applications, where somebody, let's say from China, applies in Buffalo, and we may not have the expertise at those posts that our staff would have in China. We face a number of problems. I would prefer to try to reduce the number of offshore claims so that the expertise on China is available where the application is made.

We do get a large number of applications made from the United States by people who aren't American, and that somewhat complicates our task.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Ms. James.

Madam Groguhé.

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon and welcome, Mr. Collacott. With regard to applications, you suggest that interviews should be conducted within the embassies. Do you have any idea of the costs and time frames associated with such an interview process?

[Martin Collacott]

I would hope there wouldn't be a major delay, because the person who's making the application is going to come into the embassy anyway. But the costs would be considerable if you had enough Canada-based staff to do this. I don't know what the current figure is. I think it's about $400,000 a year to keep a Canada-based staff overseas, rent a house for them, have their family there, with maybe some of them going to school in Canada. So it is not cheap at all.

I would hope the costs could be managed fairly well, but it would cost money. It would cost a lot of money, more than we're putting into it now.

I don't think it would delay the processing by a great deal, though.

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

You don't believe that would delay the process, but would it have an impact on time frames?

[Martin Collacott]

A good interview might take an hour or two.

No, I don't think it would. We're already facing a problem of wait times because of the sheer volume of people applying. We're not doing things as quickly as we'd like to and should be doing. That's an issue in itself.

I don't think the interview is going to take that long, an hour or two, so I don't think it will have much impact on the wait time.

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

How do you think an individual interview would make it possible to establish the veracity of the facts and information gathered?