Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Feb. 26th, 2014

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Coming back to the documents, how many “Welcome to Canada” guides have been issued and how many of them have been downloaded from the site? In your opinion, are they effective tools?

[Robert Orr]

I do have the numbers, but I'm sorry—

[Ryhan Mansour]

It's 75,000 in English that have been published and 17,000 in French. These are distributed.

Every new family gets a copy at arrival. They also are distributed in four major airports in the country as well as in over 200 service provider organizations, members of Parliament offices, as you know, schools, and other organizations in the community.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Ms. Sitsabaiesan.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

If they are provided in members of Parliament offices, I'm wondering if I could get some for my office, please. I don't know how to make that happen, but if you could let me know later, that would be great.

I'm going to continue in the same vein. Mr. Mansour, I know you wanted to answer. With settlement service agencies and funding cuts over the last four years, many of them in my community have had to either go from having three full-time staff to one part-time staff person, or close their doors, or really reduce the number of hours they are available for the service they were originally providing. Their backlogs are growing and their caseloads are just exorbitant. This is what our settlement service agencies are telling me in my community. Now, if you are turning these victims of violence towards the local service agencies in the community, how would they actually be able to support these women?

[Ryhan Mansour]

I would start by saying that the federal investment in settlement programming outside of Quebec has almost tripled from less than $200 million in 2005-06 to its current level of almost $600 million for 2013-14, which is a tripling of the amount, and actually having a peak of $650 million in 2010-11. This funding supports program activities that help facilitate the settlement and integration of newcomers across the country.

I would say that the level of investments that were put across the country do show the support, and the levels of allocations per province are based on intake in immigration, so it is not a matter of capacity but more that the dollars follow where the immigrants land in the country.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

From the numbers that I looked at the last time for another study we were doing, a lot of the migrants were coming to Ontario, and specifically within Ontario, to Toronto. A lot of the people do end up in Toronto. I'm looking at local settlement service agencies that have had to severely reduce their services. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me right now, but I know there was a large round of cuts which I believe happened in 2008. Nevertheless, I'll come back another time with more details once I have the actual research in front of me.

Once again my question will be about the services provided to abused people in these violent situations. Is having conversations with them in their mother language a best practice?

I don't know how to say your last name, Ms....

[Angela Gawel]

Gawel.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Seeing my name, I'm very concerned about saying other people's names correctly.

I know you mentioned services are provided at visa offices in the home country, but here, when women—and men also, but the study is about women—are in abusive situations, is addressing them in their mother language a best practice?

[Robert Orr]

Yes, it would be. Indeed, the guidelines that are set out for officers in the operational bulletin do set out the importance of having good translation and making sure that the translator is not going to be someone who's from the community and thus it may make it more difficult for the individual to speak freely.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Thank you.

Other countries provide in legislation that abused spouses have a means to leave the relationship and obtain or maintain permanent residency. Has CIC looked into what other countries have been doing recently to mitigate the potential for abuse in these situations?

[David Manicom]

Yes. There are a number of other countries that have conditional permanent resident types of provisions for sponsored spouses. The United States, the U.K., and Australia do; New Zealand does not.

Our provision is relatively new, but we do have provisions, as we've noted, for persons who are in an abusive situation to leave that situation and not have their permanent resident status at risk.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

What are some of the best practices from those other countries that we have identified as useful, or that could be applied here in Canada?

[David Manicom]

Best practices with regard to what, Madam?

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

For some of these provisions.

[David Manicom]

I'm afraid I don't have with me whether or not other countries have Canada's provision to enable persons in an abusive situation to not meet their conditions without losing their permanent resident status. I don't have that information with me. But I think Canada's provisions for that would be the best practice.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Mr. Wallace, welcome.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's my pleasure to be here. I'm just filling in today. I'm not normally on this committee.

I'll start with this, since the assistant deputy minister is here. I'm the member for Burlington, and my office in Burlington gets excellent service from the immigration folks whom we call. You probably hear lots of complaints about things. In fact, as I pointed out, immigration is not the number one issue in my constituency office—actually, CRA is—but we do have a number of cases, of course, as does any constituency. My staff, who have been with me for eight years now, have been dealing with your staff at the lower level. They have done an excellent job for us. We don't always get the answer we want, but they are good at getting back to us, and I do appreciate the work that the staff at that level do. I wanted to make sure you knew that.

On another thing, if I asked residents in Burlington whether they know the difference between an arranged marriage and a forced marriage, they may not see the difference. I think I understand what an arranged marriage is based on those of some of my friends who have gone back to their country of origin and had an arranged marriage, but from an immigration perspective, can you explain to me what the difference is between a forced marriage and an arranged marriage?

[David Manicom]

As I've mentioned, I've served in both Pakistan and India, and those are two cultures where arranged marriages are common. It's really important to understand that in cultures where there are arranged marriages, there is also no tolerance for forced marriages.

There's a clear distinction between the two. The primary distinction is consent, freely given consent for the marriage. As we know, there is any manner of hybrid of arranged marriages in those communities and there are different roles played by different family members in bringing a couple together or proposing to a couple that they may wish to be together, but it's really based on free and wilful consent. A forced marriage is really something completely different.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

I appreciate that.

You talked about “Welcome to Canada” in your opening statement. You talked about how forced marriages will not be tolerated, as well as a number of other crimes and so on. That is indicated to individuals once they get here and not in the country they're coming from. Is that correct? There's no education in the country of origin of the man or woman who is coming here through a marriage, but once they get here, they get this information. Is that correct?

[Robert Orr]

Well, the information is accessible beforehand, certainly online. We would strongly encourage people to look at that.

In addition, we have some programs where there are orientation programs that people can undertake before they arrive. It's not available everywhere, but it certainly is in a number of different countries.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

There is an issue I see in my riding, and I think Immigration Canada does a very good job of making people go through lots of hoops on this one. When it comes to marriages, there are people who come to my office, and we help them the best we can, whether they are male or a female, who are marrying somebody from another country and there's a significant difference in their ages. They come here and things maybe don't work out as well as they thought they would.

Are you able to track, in terms of the numbers, where somebody is using the system to come here versus the marriages of convenience? Is that considered a marriage of convenience, based on what fraud that other individual is doing?

[Robert Orr]

There would be a number of factors that would make a visa officer sit up and look closely at an application. A significant difference in age might be one of those. That doesn't mean we're going to refuse the application, because it could be very valid. There are a number of indicators, that being one of them, of whether we would want to look at the application more carefully.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

This is my final question. For someone to be a refugee, is spousal abuse one of the reasons for being a refugee? The study is on protection of women in immigration, so I'm including the refugee portion as part of the immigration system.

If someone gets to our soil and says, “I'm declaring refugee status because of spousal abuse”, is that one of the reasons that can be used? Do you know?