Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to participate here today.
I'll begin by telling you a bit about the perspective I'm going to make my statements from. I'm a sole practitioner immigration lawyer in Toronto. I largely do refugee work, though I also do some work with economic migrants. My understanding is that the context under which I came to the attention of the committee was that I happened to represent a very nice woman who made a refugee claim with her daughter. Her 8-year-old daughter was accepted as a refugee, but she was not. She was put in a position where she could potentially be deported, while her daughter has every right to stay in Canada.
Now, I also understand that the topic of today's sitting of the committee is voluntary migration. Refugees aren't necessarily often seen to be voluntary migrants, so I'll begin by making a general point there.