Citizenship and Immigration Committee on June 6th, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

You are, sir. Thank you.

Madame Groguhé, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank our witnesses for joining us this morning.

First of all, I would like to point out that our officers are certainly not to blame. Let me just remind you that they are simply applying a policy. This must be said, because they cannot be the only ones to come in for criticism.

Officials from Citizenship and Immigration Canada appeared before this committee to talk about temporary resident visa applications and told us that 18% of applications are rejected by Canadian authorities. They also said that, if the claim is rejected, the person has to fill out a new application, which involves additional procedures.

In your view, are there any possible solutions to limit those additional procedures in the processing of applications?

[Avvy Yao-Yao Go]

Assuming that across the board 50% of people are refused the first time due to administrative error on their own part, then maybe one way is to make the visa application process more easy to understand. Perhaps some kind of information could be more available to people who are applying, which hopefully would reduce the error rate.

But still, even if 50% is the figure, we need to look at the other 50%. Having some kind of a review mechanism I think is key. Even if you want to do it as a pilot, as Victor has suggested, we have to look at why these visas are being refused. As you said, if it's a policy issue, then why is it we have a policy that allows dual intention and we still see some of the applications being refused based on that?

Maybe a review system, not by the actual visa officer who made the decision but by another officer or department, or another mechanism, could look at the decisions and the reasons for refusal as well so that we know that the policies are being consistently applied.

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

Mr. Wong, earlier, you talked about the possibility of taking a holistic approach in processing these applications. What do you mean by a “holistic approach”? Could you be more specific, please?

[Victor Wong]

I appreciate the comments of Mr. Opitz with regard to security. We have already mentioned that there are issues with regard to trafficking.

Let's look at it from a business case perspective. If you're rejecting around 20% of your applicants, and if we use this 300,000 figure—just a rough back-of-the-envelope case—it would be around 60,000 rejections. Let's say they don't come here. Based on Canadian tourism, each Chinese tourist spends around $2,000, so we're leaving about $100,000 on the table. That's what I'm getting at from a business perspective. That is the opportunity cost for the security we want to have or the status quo.

I think we need to look at a more holistic approach in terms of what exactly we want here. I want to be very clear, the Prime Minister appears to want more Chinese visitors. He has gone to China a couple of times. I think all MPs support this, but do Canadians support this?

We have to be out there a little bit more with regard to this issue. There are too many stories around. There is, in my view, an anti-Chinese sentiment that has entered some of the public discourse on a whole range of other issues with regard to Chinese investment, etc. It spills over to issues like visitors. Do you want to see more Chinese visitors here?

What we have to do is influence—the administration has to catch up with what MPs and the Prime Minister are saying, that you want to see more visitors here.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Mr. Wong.

Mr. Weston, I want to finish at 9:40. You have up until then.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

[Member speaks in Mandarin]

Having spent half of my professional life in greater China, I always felt very welcomed by the people whom I worked with in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.

It's great to come from a country that is as welcoming as Canada, I'm sure you would agree.

I have a couple of questions. Firstly, do you think the applicants should pay the full cost of an appeal? Clearly, when we start talking about other mechanisms like this, who should pay, the Canadian taxpayer or the applicant?

[Victor Wong]

I think it would be part of the process. I'm just throwing this option open to the committee and the immigration department to consider.

In my view, you're rejecting too many people. If there are trafficking issues, if there are security issues, then perhaps an in-person interview would be able to pick up some of this stuff. If you made that part of your application protocol.... So you're going to approve 80%, 83%. Okay. That's done. For 17%...perhaps you pilot a segment of it.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

The question is, should the taxpayers pay? That's what I'm getting at.

Ms. Go, fairly quick.

[Avvy Yao-Yao Go]

I don't think the visitors should bear the cost, or at least not the full cost.

No, there's no appeal system in Canada anywhere where the appellants have to pay the full costs of the system.

Also, I think if you ask visitors for payment, there's no incentive for the system to change.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Right.

[Avvy Yao-Yao Go]

Unless you say that if they win, they get the money back. Then yes, maybe.

Otherwise the visa will continue to be rejected. Then you pass on the visa to appeal.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you.

You can see there's always balance between cost and benefit—the taxpayers' cost and what we're trying to do here—as well as balancing between tourism and security.

I'm a champion of tourism, of opening doors, of bringing people from Asia to West Vancouver—the Sunshine Coast and the whole country for sure. But what about balancing the security versus those interests?

Alice.

[Alice Choy]

Yes. I have some opinions. Actually, as I said, I don't blame the visa officer. There is one thing as to why there is a high rejection rate. Maybe the agent who does the...what do you call the letter?

[Victor Wong]

It's the invitation letter.

[Alice Choy]

Yes, I mean the invitation letter.

Usually they go through some travel agents. They have to pay a few hundred dollars for this letter. They let them handle it. Sometimes I think that maybe.... I had one case last year in which they got a fake letter. That was from Niagara Falls.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

I'm just going to say one thing, Mr. Chair. The super visa is just out; it hasn't been out for long. I think it's going to be great for your clients, and it may need just a little more promotion from you.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Wong, Ms. Choy, Ms. Go, all three of you have given excellent presentations. Thank you very much for coming and sharing your views on this topic with us. Thank you on behalf of the committee.

We will suspend for a few moments.

I might add, just to remind you, that the meeting will end at 10:40.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We will reconvene for the second portion of our meeting this morning.

We have three members of the bar representing here this morning: Elizabeth Long—good morning to you—Peter Rekai, and Ms. Taub, who has been here before several times, I seem to recall.

You each have up to eight minutes to make a presentation, and then members of the committee will have questions for you.

Ms. Long, we will start with you. Thank you for coming.

[Elizabeth Long, Barrister and Solicitor, Long Mangalji LLP, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for having me.

Just as an introduction, my name is Elizabeth Long. I'm an immigration lawyer and am in my ninth year of practice, exclusively in immigration law and mostly with regard to paper applications, such as temporary resident visas. Over my years of practice I have processed hundreds of temporary resident visas for visitors, students, and workers from around the world.

One of the main issues I want to talk about today is the criteria used by visa officers. lt is extremely unclear, first of all, in the criteria what exactly they should be looking at. As a result, the way they apply the criteria and what they use to determine whether or not a person should be issued a temporary resident visa is often wrong.

For example, officers often look at whether or not someone has strong ties in Canada as a reason for rejection. There are people who have family members in Canada: for example, a widow who has a child in Canada and who will often not be able to get a visa because she has family in Canada whom she wants to visit; or people who are being sponsored but who can't come to Canada because their husbands or wives are in Canada.

You also have “temporary intent” being applied instead of dual intent, which is what the act actually states. Temporary intent occurs when an officer asks: are you going to want to stay in Canada permanently, or temporarily?

That is the wrong criterion. Subsection 22(2) of the act—and I apologize for reading it, but I feel this is important—reads:

An intention by a foreign national to become a permanent resident does not preclude them from becoming a temporary resident if the officer is satisfied that they will leave Canada by the end of the period authorized for their stay.

What that means is that the officer is not supposed to look at whether or not a person has temporary or permanent resident intent, but at whether or not they are likely to follow the laws of Canada and leave when they're supposed to. If the officers apply temporary intent, that often leads to a very wrong decision.

For example, students are encouraged to come to Canada and to settle. That's why we have the CEC program and that's why we have the post-grad work permit program: to encourage them to stay. But officers at the visa post, for example, look at whether the students have temporary or permanent intent.

Oftentimes, for example, students' families are not allowed to come to Canada to join them while they are studying because the officers want to leave some ties to the home country. I have seen examples of students having to leave their studies and go back home because their families can't join them and they can't leave their husbands and their children back home.

Oftentimes, there are couples who sometimes even have Canadian children who can't join their fathers, because their mothers can't join their husbands while they're waiting for the sponsorships to be issued and can't get the temporary resident visas to come to Canada.

Oftentimes there are workers who are coming to Canada to earn a better living, but they are rejected because they don't have enough assets back home.

What this results in is a system in disrepute. When people feel they are being unfairly judged and given unfair decisions, they come to your office and ask you to do something. Oftentimes your hands are tied and the court's hands are tied because the level of discretion that is given to officers is so high. How do you argue with officers that they are wrong, if they have so much power to determine what they want to do?

The consequences of this situation are severe. Families are unduly separated; there is economic harm when businesses aren't able to hire workers they need; universities are losing valuable students who are bright and will provide a contribution to Canada; and, as we heard from our previous speakers, tourism is also being affected.

The solution, I would suggest to you, is first that we need to have much clearer criteria for officers to follow. There should be a way, as Member Sims previously stated, for us to look at our Canadian citizens. If we want family members to join us, we might not know what the people are like overseas, but we know who the Canadians are. If we can see who your constituents are and judge by their integrity, then perhaps that's a way to determine whether or not this person is likely to obey the laws when they come to Canada.

I truly believe in an appeal system, because what you see in systems where there are abilities to appeal is that there is guidance afterwards to the officers of what is reasonable and what is unreasonable, and right now there is no such guidance.

In conclusion, this is a system that is just crying out for guidance, and I truly hope that today, when we're studying this, you will be able to provide us with some guidance.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you, Ms. Long.

Mr. Rekai, please. You have up to eight minutes, sir.

[Peter Rekai, Partner, REKAI LLP, As an Individual]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and honourable members. It's a great honour and a pleasure to be here.

I am a lawyer in Toronto. I am certified by the Law Society of Upper Canada as a specialist in the practice of immigration law. I have practised it exclusively for the past 27 years. I'm a partner in a firm that practises exclusively in the area and deals with a great number of temporary entrants, many of whom are workers and some of whom are visitors for other reasons, including permanent residents.

There are three practical aspects about the TRV visitor visa process that I want to talk to you about. I want to pick up, to some extent, where Elizabeth left off on the quality and transparency of initial TRV decisions; I want to talk briefly about the merits of an appeal process; and finally, I want to talk about the need to provide a reliable vehicle for emergency visitor visa processing, or triage, as I call it.

I know this committee has heard about the subjective grounds that are applied to visitor visa applications, and it is understandably subjective. There are many components that go into that process. It is a form of profiling. It is a form of country profiling and of individual profiling. I don't think we can get away from that.

What we do have to get away from is an officer's belief that he or she must take the form that refuses an application and arbitrarily X a number of the boxes that indicate specific reasons for the refusal, reasons that may not—and likely are not—the actual reasons for the refusal. Worst of all—and this happens all the time—officers feel compelled to check the box saying that neither the applicant nor the host has shown sufficient financial means. Typically, a 50-year-old, well-established Canadian client will come to me and say, “My nephew was refused. We've provided all kinds of financial information, but I'm going to go to my accountant and my financial adviser and we're going to present all this information back to the visa office.” I say, “No, that's not the reason he was refused. Your nephew is 22 years old, he is unemployed, he is single, and he is from Iran. Nineteen out of 20 of those applications are going to be refused. Save yourself the trouble, save your MP the trouble, and save the visa office the trouble of the second application where you pursue an avenue that has nothing to do with it.” These types of arbitrary check-offs—and they're done all the time—lead to an enormous amount of work and are basically a waste of resources. Typically, the second application comes back with different boxes checked for the refusal.

Should there be an appeal process for TRV refusals? Yes, in my view there should be, but they should be in-house departmental administrative reviews, and they should be only for those TRV applications that are sponsored, or hosted, if you like, by relatives in Canada. When you reject a Canadian's relative, the Canadian often takes it incredibly personally. The person takes it as a rejection of his or her own status in Canada and assumes that it reflects a lack of trust or respect for his own standing in the country, or worse, it communicates that to the relative abroad.

I do not recommend an external quasi-judicial body for this purpose. I understand the Australians have taken that route. We have struggled for some years with IRB, IAD backlogs, which deal with important issues, and we've been trying to get that system to move with the responsibility it currently has. We can't burden that tribunal or a similar tribunal with these kinds of new responsibilities. What we can do is have an in-house review of family supported applications, accepting the usual profiles and accepting personal circumstances and reviewing them. It could be done within the visa office that refused the applicant, but frankly, in my experience, visa officers are never comfortable reviewing a decision made by an office mate or office colleague. It just doesn't work very well. Thus an inland unit—it could be based anywhere in Canada—would be preferable. The knowledge that a decision is reviewable, and I think Elizabeth pointed this out, will itself make for better and more transparent initial decisions.

Of course, there is already a level of appeal—so don't kid yourselves—and it is in this room. MPs are the de facto level of appeal, so it's not as though it's not happening.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

We haven't found that.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!