Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm a lawyer who's been practising for 27 years now in Surrey, British Columbia. Surrey is unique in Canada. It's one of the most ethnically diverse and multicultural parts of this country. The face of that community has been substantially changed by immigration.
While there have been the inevitable growing pains in Surrey, the greater Vancouver area really stands as a testimony to Canada's forward-looking immigration policies, including the principles of multiculturalism and family reunification. I find this time and time again when I'm meeting with clients.
It's with those principles in mind that I address you on the issue of immigration application backlogs. I know that the members of this committee have heard a lot of statistics, a lot of studies, and so forth. I'm going to give you a couple of very recent examples of what's happening in the spousal category.
Last week, a woman who was originally from Nigeria but is now a Canadian citizen came into my office. She told me that she wanted to sponsor her husband, whom she had recently married. She asked me what the processing time would be. I looked it up on the Immigration website. The processing time in Accra, Ghana, which is the central processing centre nearest to Nigeria, was 22 months. When you add the 70-day processing period in Canada for the sponsor, this Nigerian Canadian sponsor will be waiting a minimum of 23-plus months, just under two years, to sponsor her spouse.
She then asked me what the waiting time was in China. I told her it was four months. She asked me why Nigerians were treated so differently. I didn't have an answer for her.
To the members of the committee, this woman deserves an answer. We shouldn't be treating sponsors and applicants differently in these categories according to what country they come from. We need to fund our consulates and processing centres in a manner that treats the applicants equally. We shouldn't have situations where the wait for a Nigerian spousal applicant is six times the wait for a Chinese or an Indian spousal applicant. There is simply not enough justification for that. We have the resources. It's a matter of allocating them properly.
I have a second example. Yesterday, a client of many years called me. He had recently returned from Angola. Selso made a refugee claim in Canada several years ago. While Selso was waiting for his refugee claim to be adjudicated upon, the civil war in Angola ended.
Now, a noticeable change in the way we reference rejected refugee claimants seems to be particular to recent years where they are now being referred to, whether it be by the honourable minister or others, as “bogus” refugee claimants.
In this instance, this man was simply a victim of the civil war having ended and not a situation where his claim was not credible, but one in which it was no longer valid. In the meantime, Selso had been married to a Canadian woman and they'd had a child. Selso was deported back to Angola.
One of the changes that this administration has made that has added greatly to the delays in spousal sponsorships has been the handling of the authorization for re-entry to Canada, or the ARC. This is something that previously would add approximately 60 days, perhaps 90 days, to an application in order for the person to get special clearance from the minister or the minister's delegate to return to the country.
Selso phoned me yesterday to thank me for the work I had done for him. It had taken him three years to return to his wife and child, a child that he doesn't know any more, a wife who's not sure if they still have a relationship any more.
Certainly there are tangible things that can be done with respect to the allocation of funds and with respect to the handling of ARCs that can speed up this processing. Clearly, with respect to the situation for parents and grandparents, I would submit that the suggestion that a ten-year multiple-entry visa be granted to alleviate the difficulty for those waiting in the queue is an important consideration. It's a good suggestion. It's one that my clients definitely have a positive reaction to, and it is a positive step that would alleviate some of the distress that's been caused by the increase in the wait periods, which are now approaching seven years for most parents and grandparents.
I close in saying that in my community, the presence of grandparents, parents, and extended families has added greatly to the cultural mosaic in Surrey. It's a success story, and whereas it's been said in other presentations that we should be looking to what other countries in Europe are doing, in fact what you'll find, if you look at many of those studies, is that many of those countries are looking—and rightfully so—to this country, to what we've done and what we've done correctly, at a forward-looking immigration policy rather than simply a populist one.
Thank you.