Thank you very much for inviting me.
I'll briefly give you a bit of my background. Before I got involved in immigration, I was a commercial banker in Canada and the United Kingdom. I began my involvement with immigration as the manager and founder of the provincial nominee program in Manitoba for the business side. I later became assistant deputy minister of immigration in Saskatchewan. I started my own immigration company in 2008. I would also like to say that my family came as refugees in 1929, escaping the Soviet Union.
As the levels of asylum seekers grow, both from those who cross the border irregularly and those who apply when they come as visitors and students, the visa officers, as Mr. Fortin was talking about, have ordinary human reactions. They increase refusal rates for all other categories that are coming in temporarily. This is very important for people to understand. Officers are the gatekeepers to Canada, and they see their job as protecting our country from those wanting to enter and make asylum claims. They believe there are good processes for applying as refugees abroad, and coming to Canada as visitors and walking across a non-controlled border crossing are not some of them. If an officer believes that an applicant for a temporary visa has even the slightest intention of applying for asylum, they will be refused a visitor visa or a student visa or a work permit. I work with many visa posts around the world, and officers have made this point abundantly clear to me.
Also, the greater the number of asylum seekers being approved in Canada, the greater the number of refusals will be for temporary visas outside of Canada—students, visitors, and workers. According to the minister's own report, those coming as international students and visitors contributed $32 billion annually to the Canadian economy in 2017, so any increase in refusal rates costs our country billions of dollars a year.
The number of student visa refusals has skyrocketed under the current federal government. In fact, in most provinces it has nearly doubled. The refusal rates have gone from mid-20% three years ago to over 50% in the last three years. Our local Manitoba association wrote to the minister about this. Minister Hussen's response was completely illogical. He simply took down the statistics from the website and refused to provide any statistics via ATIP. This is at the same time that Manitoba and most other provinces are looking at international students as a growing source of skilled labour to fill economic needs.
It has recently been well documented that visitor visa refusals have also risen dramatically. The official rate is now 26%, but this number vastly underestimates this issue. By the way, I also sit on the board of one of the largest Indian travel agencies. As their Canadian director, I can talk with some assurance about this. In places like India, getting a U.S. visa is relatively simple. Conversely, people know that the majority of Indians can't get a visitor visa to Canada, so they simply do not apply. There are millions more visitors who would like to come to Canada but who know that their visas will be refused, so they don't try. The reason they will be refused is that the officers fear they will make an asylum claim.
When we started the provincial nominee program in 1997, the processing time for many years was about six months. Over the next 18 years, it slowly grew to about 11 months. That's the federal processing time. Since the new government has taken over, the processing time has quickly escalated to 19 months. In a province like Manitoba, which relies almost entirely on the provincial nominee program for increases in skilled labour and population growth, this increase in processing time costs our little province tens of millions of dollars a year.
Finally, there is the cost of processing and settling those who make asylum claims in Canada. In my view, this is likely the smallest cost associated with this issue. The other costs—missed opportunities of students and visitors, and companies and communities being without skilled workers—are far larger and more critical. Parliament has asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to examine the costs associated with asylum seekers. I would like to ask this committee to change and amend that request so that the costs associated with refused visitors, refused students, and delays with economic immigrants be added to the costs associated with these claims.
There is only one department of IRCC, not two. The department allocates resources as they see fit. In 2017 it allocated resources to process Syrian refugees' security screening in 96 hours, down from 30 days. This is at the same time it's taken up to 11 years—a stunning number—to screen some family members who were sponsored by their children. These are resource allocations made by the government. There are no two departments. They keep repeating that there are two streams, but as one stream goes faster, the other stream goes slower. This is irrefutable.
It is also irrefutable that as asylum seeker approval numbers grow, the refusal of other temporary categories goes up substantially.
The approval rate of asylum seekers in the United States under the Obama administration was 18%. In the U.K. it is 28%. In France it is 32%. In Canada, under this government, it is now 70% and rising, but even this rate is dramatically understated.
The 30% who are refused have several ways of remaining. Of course, they can appeal, but contrary to what Mr. Vaughan said, the vast majority of those crossing irregularly are single men. Many refused applicants simply get married and remain as spouses, while others are unable to be removed due to a lack of travel documents or pre-removal risk assessment. There are also humanitarian and compassionate grounds, and some even qualify as federal skilled workers.
To the best of my knowledge, there have never been any statistics released on the actual number of asylum seekers who are allowed to remain in Canada. Anecdotally, visa officers claim that about half of those who are initially refused are allowed to stay for various reasons, for a total of 85% approval. I am not aware of any other developed country that allows 85% of asylum seekers to remain.
In Canada, regardless of which party you are in or support, we passionately believe in fairness. All of us do; no party has a lock on it. Yet when it comes to asylum seekers, it is hyperbole, political correctness, and lack of any economic data or analysis that seem to rule.
There should be one door to enter Canada, and that is the front door.
Thank you.