Okay. I'm very happy to hear that.
All right. I will do my best. The point I wanted to raise and the reason that I think I ended up here—through conversations with Don Davies—is a problem with TRV processing. It has practical aspects and it has social policy aspects.
The processing of TRVs is something that is done quite quickly and without attention to the details that one would consider important in terms of security, i.e., public safety, health considerations, or criminality. The TRV processing at post is a fairly cursory examination of the application.
I recall that when I was serving in Tokyo in the early nineties, the visa post in Taiwan made a unilateral decision to issue a visa to everyone who applied, because they were publicly—well, at least within the departments—throwing up their hands and saying that they had neither the resources, nor the staff, nor the time, to do any justice to the vetting of the applications, so there seemed to be no point in making arbitrary decisions about which ones to accept and which ones to reject.
We held our collective breaths. This was not long before the visa requirement was removed from Taiwan, so I imagine that the decision was already imminent and made the decision to stop actually vetting these applications in Taiwan much less scary, at the very least.
But it does speak to the value we get as taxpayers from having visa applications looked at by foreign service immigration officers overseas. Much as I hate to begrudge my colleagues those postings, given the various backlogs that exist within the immigration system and given the shallowness of the processing of TRVs, one wonders whether that's the best use of resources.
On the policy issues, while these applications are getting a fairly cursory treatment, they are violating standards of procedural fairness, and I think bringing discredit to the immigration system. Similarly, the reason that I arrived here was a couple of cases that came to me via an MP's office, via Don Davies' office.
The reason given for refusals is basically that you've failed to convince the officer that you have sufficient ties to your home country. It becomes a process of trying to guess what's in the visa officer's mind and how one could possibly satisfy unknown criteria as to what constitutes sufficient ties to one's home country. On top of that, you have the supporting family in Canada, and, in this one instance, Canadian taxpayers: six Canadian taxpayers who submitted their notices of assessment and letters of financial support for a single applicant that they were trying to have come to Canada for a wedding.
If six Canadian taxpayers submitting financial documents is not sufficient to convince a visa officer that the visitor will financially be taken care of, then what is the point of asking? Or what are the clear guidelines on an aggregate amount of income—I mean, we couldn't be LICO, I don't think—that would satisfy a visa officer? Financials aside, the considerations that go into sufficient ties to one's home country are entirely opaque.
In my submission.... I don't know if I submitted it early enough for you to have received it translated...? I've lost my train of thought...where was I?