Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 8th, 2012

[Rick Dykstra, Conservative, St. Catharines, ON]

There is no mean or average in terms of how much time you have with one application that you could provide.

[Sharon Chomyn]

There is no quota. There's no minimum or maximum time. The cases are done on a case-by-case basis.

[Sidney Frank]

If I could add something, and I think this is important, what we look for in a visa office anywhere is to discourage people from applying who have no possibility of qualifying.

In terms of the student applications in Chandigarh, we were very successful in 2011. Overall applications went down considerably. I don't have the exact statistics, but the refusal rates went down and the acceptance rate went up. In fact we issued the same number of study permits with fewer applications received.

I regard that as a real success. It means we got the word out there: “Don't bother applying if you don't have a chance of being successful. Don't listen to these people who say you can apply and get a visa.”

People pay money up front to the consultants, and the consultants don't care if you get a visa or you don't.

To give you the flavour of what it's like in Chandigarh, in the Punjab, we had an individual outside of the consulate general—on the street there—who was saying he was a Canadian visa officer and he could get people visas. He was only taking a small fee. It was a couple of hundred dollars but that was enough for him, and it was enough to dupe a hundred people, until he got caught and was sent away.

That's the climate we're working in.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Frank.

Mr. Leung.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to both witnesses.

It is a pleasure to see you again, Sidney Frank—in Canada this time.

There are some operative words that I picked up in Ms. Chomyn's statement, and they are “actual intention”. How do you assess “actual intention”? Now I realize in determining admissibility that there's a subjective evaluation, and then obviously there's an objective one.

Could you share with us how you assess actual intention? How do we track that person once he's in this country, even though his intentions were not genuine, to make sure that he leaves?

[Sharon Chomyn]

I'll do my best to answer that question, Mr. Chair.

Intention is absolutely a very difficult concept. How can I say it? It's both art and science.

An officer who's processing an application will note the stated reason for a visit. The officer will take a look at the applicant's total circumstances. They'll look at their ties to their home country, ties to Canada, motivation to return, possible motivation to not return after their stated visit. They'll look at their financial circumstances. They'll take a look at their immigration history: whether they've visited Canada before, whether there were any abuses associated with previous visits. They might look to see whether there had been any issues with respect to partner countries and this individual's attempts to travel, or successes in travelling there in the past.

How do you assess intent? At the end of the day, it comes down to judgment. When we prepare visa officers for posting, first, we select them because we believe they do have a good sense of judgment, and then we spend time working with them to help them refine that judgment.

There are always quality assurance exercises that go on with admissions. Program managers follow up on decisions to make sure officers are in fact exercising good judgment. They look for consistency across decision-makers, to make sure it's not the luck of the draw as to whether or not you get a visa depending on which officer you're interacting with.

There are reference materials prepared and reports that are shared amongst officers. Officers inform themselves of the local circumstances.

All of these things come together as both art and science in assessing intent.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

So there is a profile developed for intent, then. There is that type of particular person we do admit into Canada, based on that profile.

[Sharon Chomyn]

I wouldn't call it a profile, because that casts a certain image to suggest that there's a recipe for it. It's a set of factors that officers take into account and try to balance in making a judgment about an individual's intentions relative to what they may have stated those intentions to be at the time of application.

I might add that 82% of applicants are actually issued visas. These are temporary resident visas. We consider most individuals to be very low-risk travellers. It's actually separating the low-risk from the not-quite-so-low-risk that's the challenge.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Okay.

Mr. Frank, the next question has to do with fraudulent documentation. I was also recently in India, and I could see where you could easily pick up an honorary degree of any nature. For a degree of any nature, you could go into a back room and buy some really elaborately decorated ones. I understand you worked in China as well.

Comparatively speaking, when documentation comes in hand, is it not easier just to go to the source and ask if they could verify that? For example, university admissions can be verified with a Canadian university versus just a photocopy of a piece of paper that says “certified to be a true copy”. I am sure there are other methods we can use to pretty well eliminate the risk of receiving fraudulent documentation.

[Sidney Frank]

Within India, the possibilities for accurate verifications vary considerably. There are some institutions, whether they're schools, public institutions, or private companies, where we can reliably go to them, we can make a call, we can send an e-mail, and we can do a verification. There are others where, unfortunately, that's not possible.

In some instances, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, there could actually be collusion with someone in an institute. Through bribery, he will issue a document to which the holder isn't entitled.

That really is the challenge for us. It's not like in Canada, where you can go to any school and you can verify the authenticity of a document that the school issued. We have to build knowledge in terms of which verifications we can rely on, and which ones we can't. Our anti-fraud unit in Delhi does that.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

The third question is for both of you.

Often to ensure that a temporary visitor or visitor returns to their country, we need to look at the security of his bond to that home country so that when he's here, he will go back.

Now, this comes to the issue of bonding. Do you think that may be a possible tool in our arsenal of security tools to ensure that the temporary visitor to Canada does return?

[Sharon Chomyn]

Mr. Chairman, is the question whether Canada would set up a process of accepting bonds to guarantee the veracity of the visit?

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

It could be in many forms other than a financial bond.

[Sharon Chomyn]

I know that the model has been tried in other countries. In some cases it continues to exist, and in some cases it has been discontinued.

I'm afraid I don't have sufficient information to speak to that today.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Okay.

That's it for time?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Yes. Besides, I want to ask a couple of questions.

First, Canada doesn't have an exit policy. How would an exit policy affect your work?

[Sidney Frank]

Certainly an exit policy would tell us more effectively who remained in the country and who didn't. If we had that information, that could better inform our decision-making, and it might enable us eventually, as we gained more knowledge about who's remained in the country and who hasn't, to perhaps apply that to our decision-making.

It would be extremely helpful.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Second, the Privacy Commissioner has claimed that a failure rate of 1% is common for biometric systems. What remedies, if any, would be available to people who are erroneously matched with biometrics?

[Sharon Chomyn]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, we don't have the expertise to speak to biometrics, unless, Sid, you feel you can answer that question.

[Sidney Frank]

No.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Okay.

Mr. Kellway, it's your turn.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I thank you folks for coming before the committee today. It's wonderful to have you here.

I have to tell you that the issue of temporary residence visas takes up an enormous amount of time in my constituency office, and I hear that from my colleagues as well. It's an enormously frustrating issue to deal with both for my staff and in particular for the folks who come in, quite frankly, bewildered about what happened and why they were rejected. Those frustrations I want you to know often take the form of anger. This is a critically important issue. I welcome the opportunity to pull back the curtain a bit on what happens in a visa office.

It seems that some folks who apply for the temporary residence visa get a reason for the rejection, but not all. Is there some percentage of folks who have a reason stated?

[Sidney Frank]

I'm a bit puzzled by that because we do have to put a reason in the refusal letter. There are reasons tied to the legislation. They may not provide the kind of detail that some applicants would be hoping for. We simply don't have the resources to go into great detail about why an application has been refused.

One of the more common reasons for refusals is that people don't provide us the documentation that we requested. We have very detailed application kits. Surprisingly, people don't give all of that information. Something that we've seen far too commonly is that someone will include a letter from a member of Parliament, and they will think that this letter in and of itself should guarantee them a visa when they don't provide the supporting documents.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

That's certainly one of the pressures on a member of Parliament, that often people assume it's somehow quite magic or something.

[Sidney Frank]

We do listen to what you have to say I can assure you.