Thank you very much for your question.
I feel in general very wary of moving activities that are essential to state interests to private companies. I have a general reluctance to think that giving various visa companies, which are charged with basically just collecting the data a lot of authority over the immigration system. I know the government has already made decisions to have various visa-related information collected by private companies.
I have a general anxiety about making these kinds of moves. The privatization of immigration procedures is something that many countries are considering. I think it's dangerous, mainly for the reason that private companies are more difficult to keep track of.
In the U.K. experience, the U.K. also this summer started to withdraw from the use of private companies to evaluate and collect various kinds of data. The reason is that those companies do a very poor job of protecting the privacy of applicants, especially when those applicants come from countries where they might be dissidents at risk of political persecution in the case that their documentation becomes public.
That seems a really high risk, something that we don't want to take. That seems very dangerous. I think the privacy issue is paramount, and issues of transparency and accountability for companies that are not in fact government run.
Finally, there is an issue of equality. Those organizations are charging money, and they're charging extra money on top of what Canada already charges. It's already discriminating against immigrants who might come from poor countries but might nevertheless be a good fit for Canada.