Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 1st, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I'm going to close it, then, at this point.

Mr. Collacott, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bhatti, all three of you are obviously very experienced in this topic, and on behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank you for your presentations and for answering the questions of the committee members. Thank you for coming.

This meeting is suspended for a moment.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to reconvene the meeting.

We have three witnesses. Two are via teleconference, and one is here in Ottawa.

Monsieur Dan Bohbot, who represents the Quebec Immigration Lawyers Association, is here with us.

Good morning to you, sir.

We have, by video conference from Hamilton, Professor Arthur Sweetman from the Department of Economics at McMaster University, who appeared also on Bill C-11.

Good morning, Mr. Sweetman. Can you hear us?

[Professor Arthur Sweetman, Department of Economics, McMaster University, As an Individual]

Good morning. I can hear you, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, sir.

We have a video conference from Toronto. I see one person, but I see two names.

Felix Zhang: is that you, sir?

[Felix Zhang, Coordinator, Sponsor our Parents]

Yes. Unfortunately, the other representative couldn't come today.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, sir. I'm glad you are here.

You are the coordinator of the organization called Sponsor our Parents.

[Felix Zhang]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Okay.

We will start with Monsieur Bohbot. You have up to eight minutes to make a presentation, sir.

[Dan Bohbot, President, Quebec Immigration Lawyers Association (AQAADI)]

Thank you Chair. My presentation will be in French.

Thank you for inviting me to speak before you today. I was admitted to the Bar in 1990 and have been practising immigration law ever since. Moreover, I am President of the Quebec Immigration Lawyers Association.

If you’ve followed the debate surrounding what is known as the backlog, you’ll remember that in 2008, the former Minister of Immigration, Diane Finley, had already reported 900,000 pending applications. That was three years ago already. In 2008, critics accused the government of putting a cap on human resources in certain embassies and of making sure that the backlog was greater in certain regions than in others.

It would be interesting to know, concerning the backlog of millions of files, which embassies are responsible for dealing with these files. Delays are longer or shorter depending on where the immigration application is filed. We will probably realize that, in fact, there is a regional quota. And so, by limiting human resources in certain embassies, one limits the number of persons from the region who can immigrate to Canada.

Approximately three years ago, while working in the field, I could not help but notice an important shift in the philosophy related to a stricter application or enforcement of the Act, particularly with regards to spousal sponsorship, to alleged war criminals, to citizens, to refugees and also, even though there is no direct link to immigration issues, to passports. There were examples of this shift in the media, this summer.

I haven’t seen—and I don’t know that there are any—the merits of the punitive measures that the present government has imposed to immigrants. We don’t know if we are getting our money’s worth and if what immigrants are blamed for, that is for having supposedly forged documents or become citizens by fraudulent means, as the Minister claims, is so costly to Canadian society that it becomes necessary to launch an investigation in order to strip them of their Canadian citizenship by means of a lengthy and costly judicial process. We don’t know.

The Minister of Immigration’s words are alarming as are those of the Minister of Public Safety. He warns that according to certain surveys, most of the world’s population wants to immigrate to Canada. He believes that the situation will only get worse. We know, for example, that he refuses to accept that refugees come to Canada by illegal means. He says that these people should get in touch with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He calls the refugees queue jumpers. According to him, refugees are involved with terrorist activities, with gunrunners and illegal alien smugglers. He instils fear in Canadian citizens when he talks about refugees in this manner and with those words.

I believe that the government has clearly decided to reallocate its resources in order to challenge and deny landed immigrant status and to prevent refugees from reaching Canada rather than to accelerate the immigration selection process.

Immigrants believe in Canadian values. They come to this country because they believe that Canada is committed to family reunification. This is a principle that is found in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. If Canada wants to attract the best immigrants in the world, we will have to let them decide whether or not to bring their families here, otherwise we won’t have the best immigrants but rather, the most desperate ones, particularly from a financial point of view. The present government’s stance jeopardizes Canada’s credibility on the international scene and more and more immigrants decide not to remain in Canada.

The minister cannot hide behind political choices that aim to restrict the number of employees in its embassies and to create an ever-increasing backlog in order to bring all of Canada to adopt its point of view and its solutions to deal with the backlog. In law, “no one can be heard to invoke his own turpitude” and this is exactly what the minister is attempting to do when he speaks of a million cases. It is clear that the minister wishes to have more discretion in this matter. He even says so when he mentions the minister’s directions and states that they should apply to sponsorship cases. By exercising his discretion, he places himself out of the reach of the Federal Court that he accuses of not being sufficiently accommodating. By doing so, he has challenged the principle of judicial independence, a pillar of our democracy.

Immigrants who have paid in order to have their immigration application examined by Canadian authorities have the right to a decision. This decision must be rendered in a fair, equitable and impartial manner in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. In breaching this principle, our government stands to be challenged in a court of law and such challenges require even more money and resources. The only path that the government can follow is to respect human rights.

And so, I invite this committee to act with caution in its recommendations to the government. I invite you to require more information from the Minister of Immigration in order to understand what is really going on and to be aware of the issues involved.

I thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, sir.

Mr. Sweetman, you have up to eight minutes, sir.

[Prof. Arthur Sweetman]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear.

Overall, in characterizing the origin of the immigration backlog, I'm going to use some very approximate numbers for illustrative purposes. Canada currently receives roughly 450,000 applications per year, grants roughly 250,000 admissions, and observes approximately 100,000 unsuccessful files. This leaves an excess of 100,000 applications. It's obvious that if such a context endures, a backlog will accumulate.

These numbers also reveal that, relative to its population, Canada has a very large immigration program, in fact one of the largest of any developed country. My belief is that the substantial scale of this program requires much more careful management than would a smaller one. A superficial analysis suggests a few alternatives to preventing a backlog. The government might take action to, first, increase the number of admissions per year; and/or second, reduce the number of applications; and/or third, increase the number of unsuccessful files.

While I recognize that there are several feasible ways to go forward and that the system is complex—with layers of ministerial instructions overall and immigration-class-level annual targets and immigration-class-specific processing priorities—I'm going to put forward a package of three proposals for the skilled worker program. These proposals are regarding, first, the elimination of the backlog; second, the operation of a system that does not accumulate a backlog; and finally, I'm going to offer a quite specific recommendation for managing an aspect of the immigration flow. Given time constraints, these can be thought of as examples of a consistent approach to immigration selection.

First, regarding the current backlog and focusing on the skilled worker program, I believe the backlog's existence is problematic to the operation of Canada's immigration system. Further, the associated problems become more serious as time passes. Therefore, I conclude that eliminating it quickly is beneficial.

At the national level, the existence of the backlog is detrimental because of its impact on Canada's reputation, the operation of the immigration system, and its negative implications for the labour market.

At the individual level--for the new immigrants themselves, that is--I believe there is convincing evidence of an age profile for successful labour market integration. Among immigrants of working age, younger immigrants have better lifetime labour market outcomes. This implies that if an individual sits in the queue for three, four, or five years, there's a simultaneous deterioration in that person's ability to integrate into the Canadian labour market, and it reduces that person's lifetime earnings profile.

On the labour market demand side, it also seems credible that during the current period of slow growth following the recent recession, the need for specific occupations, as provided by the ministerial instructions, is reduced relative to that expected in the cyclical upturn that I believe will arrive in a few years.

Putting this all together, given that Canada has a legal and a moral obligation to process those in the backlog at some point, this is the time in the business cycle when admitting those who do not have an occupational screen is least detrimental. Moreover, the longer people in the backlog remain there, the poorer, on average, their labour market outcomes will be after arrival.

This logic immediately leads to my first proposal: imposing very tight restrictions on acceptance of new applications for a short period and processing the existing backlog expeditiously. I'm not talking about any changes to the immigration targets; I'm simply recommending a new strategy regarding the priority for processing. Assuming we need to address the backlog at some point, it seems sensible to bite the bullet and eliminate it sooner rather than later, since the costs of doing so later are probably larger than doing so at present.

I'll turn to my second proposal, with respect to the ongoing operation without a new backlog being built up. As discussed in the recent evaluation of IRPA, when that legislation was introduced, the thinking behind it was that the flow in the skilled worker program would be managed by adjusting the minimum points required for entry. However, this aspect was never undertaken. Clearly, most agree that it is unfair to change the points threshold after an application has been submitted. But with appropriate warning, the points cutoff could be adjusted on an annual basis for each upcoming year, much like the levels are at present.

This contrasts with the current government's approach in recent ministerial instructions, which impose a quota. Although a quota may be an important backstop, and it certainly limits the number of applications, it is not necessarily the best first-line treatment since it does nothing to improve the labour market outcomes for new immigrants whereas increasing the points threshold would do so.

This is important, since it's well documented that the labour market outcomes of new immigrant cohorts have been declining for the past few decades. We should not address the backlog in isolation from other important immigration policy issues, and this proposal has the potential to address the two simultaneously. It's also a return to what was envisioned for this legislation at its onset. Updating the points system to attune it more closely to, for example, Canada's changing demographic situation also seems sensible. However, that's not directly related to the backlog.

The third and final part of this set of proposals recognizes the value in making ongoing adjustments to aspects of the immigration program to simultaneously avoid a backlog and improve the efficiency of immigrant selection.

I believe the federal government should get out of the business of selecting immigrants in provincially regulated health professions where a sizeable proportion of the workers are funded by provincial governments. Rather, I believe that such workers should be admitted through the provincial nominee programs.

At the top of the list for this group would be physicians and nurses. I'm actually making a very narrow proposal here--

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Sweetman, could you wind up, please?

[Prof. Arthur Sweetman]

I'm at the very end.

I'm actually making a very narrow proposal, since this is a very special set of occupations given the nature of our medicare program. Provincial and federal governments are facing substantial challenges integrating international medical graduates into our health care system.

Domestically, provincial governments have very strict quotas and central control over the number of individuals accepted into Canadian medical schools, since this is one of the primary mechanisms by which medicare expenditures are managed, and simultaneously, health care services planning is undertaken--

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We have to move on.

[Prof. Arthur Sweetman]

--but this control is lacking at the federal level. Shifting this to provincial control would seem to improve efficiency and the backlog.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, sir.

Mr. Zhang, are you there, sir?

[Felix Zhang]

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the committee for inviting me to speak on behalf of the Sponsor our Parents group. My name is Felix Zhang, and I'm the representative of Sponsor our Parents, which has more than 1,500 members across Canada.

We are Canadian citizens and permanent residents sponsoring our parents to Canada. We'd like to draw to the attention of the committee the long-standing issues of imbalance in processing times and the huge backlog in the parents and grandparents sponsorship class.

First, processing times for our parents in sponsorship's step two vary drastically--from six months to five years--around the world. Ottawa imposes particular quotas by country. Why do some sponsors have to wait much longer than others just because their parents live in a different country? We believe this is discrimination against origin and this must be corrected immediately.

We urge CIC to centrally manage the two-step immigration process through a single queue rather than assign quotas by country. This will enable all applications to be processed on a first come, first served basis, which will ensure fairness to all sponsors.

In addition, CIC should allocate more resources to the longest-waiting visa offices to clean up the backlogs and balance processing times among all overseas visa offices.

Secondly, the backlog in the parents and grandparents sponsorship class has increased dramatically in the past few years. As of the end of June 2011, more than 168,000 applicants were waiting for immigration visas or sponsorship approval.

Hundreds of thousands of Canadian families are anxiously waiting to reunite with their parents or grandparents. However, despite the fast-growing backlog and wait time, CIC did a deep cut of the visa quota by 30% this year. Even the minister repeatedly promised to keep the same level as previous years. In the last five years, the admission quota for parents and grandparents counted between 7% to 8% of all immigration visas. We urge CIC to reverse the recent cut and maintain the same ratio for parents and grandparents in the coming years.

Thirdly, based on the annual admission quota for this year, the current backlog will require more than 15 years to be processed. That is simply not practical for aging parents. If a reform is necessary in order to reduce the wait time, we urge CIC to ensure the fairness, consistency, and transparency of any change.

Today I would like to take this opportunity to present a few very practical and feasible solutions suggested by our members. The most popular one is that parents should have a higher priority because they are closer family members than grandparents, brothers, and sisters. This is very reasonable and widely supported by group members.

The second one is that aging parents without a child living in the same country should have a higher priority because they're much more vulnerable than others who are younger or who have children living in the same country to take care of them. Their applications should be fast-tracked.

The third one is that only Canadian citizens or permanent residents living in Canada for a minimum of three years are eligible sponsors. This will ensure sponsors have a long-term plan to stay here and contribute to the Canadian economy.

There are other suggestions, such as to collect an up-front health premium from the sponsor and then give a tax refund over the ten-year sponsorship period. This would allow the government to enforce the sponsor's minimum financial requirements and ensure the tax revenue from the sponsor.

The reunification with parents and grandparents is very important to new Canadians. The extremely long wait time will not only make other immigration programs less attractive but will also leave new immigrants with no choice but to move back home to take care of their parents. This will definitely have a negative impact on the efficiency and the effectiveness of Canadian immigration practice and policy.

Just recently, a group member from Brampton said he applied for the sponsorship four years ago but his father has passed away since then. He couldn't wait any longer and decided to sell all his assets in Canada and move back home to take care of his mother. He said his parents would have brought substantial money to Canada and they would have contributed to the Canadian economy.

This could have been a win-win situation had his application been processed fast enough. Unfortunately, both he and the Canadian government failed.

In short, we are very frustrated with the current practice called the family sponsorship immigration, and urge CIC to provide fair, responsible, and practical solutions to ensure all applications are processed within an equitable and reasonable timeframe around the world.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

And thank you, sir, for your presentation.

Now members of the committee will have some questions for all of you.

Mr. Menegakis.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of our presenters today. Thank you for being here and presenting to us.

I'd like to talk a little bit about how we got here. The backlogs at the moment, as we all know, are about a million-plus people. It was a little bit higher than 800,000 people in 2006, which the Conservative government inherited. It's a huge backlog, and we need to deal with it.

In hearing some of the comments today, I want to direct my first question to Mr. Zhang. I understand families want to bring their parents and grandparents to Canada. What number would you suggest, Mr. Zhang? We need to have a concrete number for what we're talking about here.

[Felix Zhang]

We are suggesting to lock the ratio rather than having an absolute number. In previous years, the ratio was about 7% to 8% of all immigrant visas. We are suggesting to keep this ratio for the coming years.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Last year, 280,000 new Canadians were welcomed to the country. That was a historic number, as we previously heard, and 250,000 has been the average over the last five years with this government.

I'm going to direct my questions to Mr. Sweetman and Mr. Zhang in particular, as I found Mr. Bohbot's comments to have been highly partisan and I don't care to ask any questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Menegakis, you can't make comments about witnesses. That's most inappropriate.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

All right, well, I'll apologize then, Mr. Chair.

But there were many comments made about the minister--

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

No, no, continue with your questions. I'm concerned, and I'm not even going to stop the clock on this. You know better.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

My question is regarding the practical limits as to how many people we can actually allow into the country every year.

What would be your feedback on that, Mr. Sweetman and Mr. Zhang?