All right.
The point I was going to make was that apart from the refugees Canada resettles from UNHCR camps abroad, such as the Syrians we hear so much about, there are voluntary or what we can call “self-selecting” refugees who make it to our border, either through the United States—the “irregular” arrivals we hear about—or through arriving on some kind of visa and then making a refugee claim.
I urge the committee to be aware that a lot of people who come this way, and who we as refugee and immigration lawyers often see, are often very sophisticated people. They're very well-educated people. They can even be wealthy people, because the persecution in their home countries that causes them to leave has nothing to do with poverty. Very wealthy, very smart people can be saying the wrong things about their government. They can be asserting rights that we consider fundamental rights in this country. They risk persecution because of that, and they choose Canada as a place to go and to try to seek protection in. In that sense, they have a lot of agency about where they will go and where they will seek protection.
There are some specific recommendations I can make in the context of their experiences. For example, the nature of the system sometimes creates odd outcomes. You can have a child who, because of her own risk, independent of her parent's risk, is accepted as a refugee but the parent isn't. That parent is often the sole provider for that child as their caregiver in Canada. In this instance, an eight-year-old girl has every right to remain in Canada, but her mother has no automatic mechanism to stay, because her own risk, as assessed by the tribunal, is not seen to be significant enough to grant her protection. This causes the parent to have to apply for permanent residence through humanitarian grounds, which again engages the bureaucracy in an application that will almost certainly be approved.
That raises the question of why we are forcing this parent to engage the resources of the government in an application that will almost certainly be approved because of the facts. We don't have a mechanism for a person like that to stay with their child, who is recognized to be a convention refugee.
There's another thing I often hear in this context. Often families can't make it to Canada together. For example, a father will make it here, but his wife and their children will remain abroad. The father will be accepted as a refugee. As an accepted protected person, he can apply for permanent residence and bring his family here once that PR application is processed and approved, but that can take at least a year. During that year, the family members who remain in the country of origin can be at great risk. The persecution doesn't stop, and it often involves the entire family. Again, there is no mechanism for those family members of a recognized and accepted refugee to come to Canada until the entire family's permanent residence application is processed. It's very ad hoc. It relies on trying to track down the officer who is working on the PR application, urging them to speed it up, essentially relying on their goodwill and discretion to maybe push it along a bit faster. That's something I often hear.
The next point touches a little bit on what the previous witness spoke about. Although refugees, once they have made a claim, have a right to apply for a work permit and work in Canada, the system is designed in such a way that the work experience, regardless of what it is, low-skilled or high-skilled, can absolutely not be used in an application to stay through an economic program. Once you've come here and asked for protection, that is the only way you can stay. You have to rely on that refugee claim. There is no way to stay by transitioning to another immigration stream.
You're waiting for your hearing, you've been working, you've been contributing to Canada's economy and to society, but there's no way for you to rely on that to apply for PR and get out of what I'll call the protection system.
Again, it's because of this idea that the refugees who come here and ask for Canada's help are purely a drain on our resources, and that we're doing it purely for humanitarian reasons. There is very little recognition that even though they're not selected for these points systems and the economic streams, they actually make a significant contribution to society.
I'm about at my seven minutes, so I'll stop there.