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.