Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 1st, 2016

[Sheila Monteiro]

Well, I'm in favour of the LICO because I think it shifts the burden away from the Government of Canada, but I think the processing time is an issue. Grandparents are not young; they're very old. If you're going to wait five to seven years to process them, they could die in that time, which is a very sad situation.

The proposal I have is to look at Australia. They have what they call contributing parents and non-contributing parents. If you want to bring your non-contributing parent, which means a parent who is not going to work, then your fees are higher but your processing time is shorter. That would be one recommendation for sure.

I think that parents certainly give a social aspect to the nuclear family, and certainly they need to consider that parents and grandparents are not a burden. They shouldn't be considered as a burden, but as more of an enhancement to our culture.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Would you agree with—

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

You have 20 seconds.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

In some cultures kids look after their parents, and a lot of people send money to their parents back home.

[Sheila Monteiro]

Yes, I do agree, and in England, they have a provision just for that. Maybe we should look at England. England has a provision that if there is no one else in your home country to look after your elder, then you can sponsor them. There are some ways of looking at it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

Mr. Saroya, you have seven minutes please.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you to both witnesses for coming and educating us.

Something caught my eye here. Mr. Kurland, you're saving $100 million in a couple of seconds. Three million hours saved times $30 an hour plus the tax on that. There's $100 million for the Minister of Finance, and the taxpayers are going to love you for this one. Could you explain it a bit more?

[Richard Kurland]

To clarify, there are approximately three million applications made in a year for immigration services, and the oddity is that individuals, for each individual application, repeatedly enter the same information again and again and again, instead of having a central repository for that individual's personal information, which is updated as time goes on. The savings come from the reduced demand for services, the reduction in confusion, the reduction in error rates by individuals, the simplification of the administrative process behind the IRCC or Wizard of Oz curtain. You can have, say, fewer paid employees doing more with less. That's the goal there.

Related to the previous question, I can't resist that we can collect more evidence-based data two ways. One, given that immigration computers do talk to the tax computers, we can track people, say, over the previous five years or over the forward five years and know where they are now. If they enter Canada under the spousal category, we can objectively measure, within a five-year period, how many remain married. That way we know objectively whether there's a signal, good or bad.

The other way is to track the officers. We can track individual decision-maker results the same way. That way, for some officers who may be generating above average refusals—marriage of convenience decisions—we can provide additional training, as suggested by the other witness.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Talking about marriages of convenience, it's all about what Sheila said, checks and balances. What checks and balances can both of you advise?

I can tell you that, in the last couple of years, I got maybe eight or 10 calls, which I've personally seen in Markham, in Woodbridge, in Scarborough, and many other places. People come in within 48 hours. Sometimes the police are called. Sometimes somebody comes in with a marriage situation, or somebody comes with a student visa. There are issues that I have personally seen. Could both of you suggest something to the committee, please?

[Richard Kurland]

In this, it's a question of what they call risk management. The magic golden nugget is something called the abuse variable. How many cases are you going to tolerate before pointing the enforcement spear? The good thing is that, for the first time in close to 10 years, there are fresh eyes with fresh ideas on the dossier and the new mantra, it seems to me, is “Why are we doing it this way? Explain it to me.” That's where the solutions are going to come from.

On the front end, I'm already witnessing, statistically, reductions in spousal processing times. There's no doubt about that. Of late, there is a new policy to facilitate the issuance of work permits at the ports of entry in appropriate spousal cases. That's the right direction. Can we do more? Yes, but we need the evidence on where to focus the resources, which particular officers or offices. That's the gap. That's what's missing.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Got it, thank you.

Do you have something to add?

[Sheila Monteiro]

Yes. I just want to add that in terms of genuine marriages, I don't have my paper with me, but there was an article written in the Toronto Star, which talked about the removal of the conditional permanent residence. It's a government study and I guess they addressed it saying that they haven't found a lot of fraudulent marriages or marriages of convenience and that the majority of the marriages are genuine.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

What's your experience, though?

[Sheila Monteiro]

My experience is that a majority of the marriages are genuine. I have seen quite a few abuse situations. Those are the ones they question, and that's okay. You can do a question on those, because those people may have, for whatever reason, never reported on time, and that's fine.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

My next question is on the wait time. In some cases, for the parents and grandparents, it takes 51 months, 48 months, or something along those lines. What is acceptable, and what can be done?

[Sheila Monteiro]

For parents and grandparents, I would say 12 months, because they are not in Canada. For whatever reason, it takes 51 months or 36 months. I'm just throwing this number out there, because I think 12 months is something I can live with. I sponsored my own mom, and it took me three years. It's ridiculous, because there is no reason for it to take that long when they have all the paperwork and everything is there. The downside of this is that, when you call Immigration, they say, “Well, you haven't reached your maximum processing time; you need to wait” or “We don't have any more information; you'll just have to wait.” That is not an answer.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Do you have something to add to that?

[Richard Kurland]

Yes, I do. I think it is entirely appropriate to have processing times published for public consumption when it comes to parents and grandparents. That way, people will know in advance of their application how long processing will take. Until the inventory is reduced, 12 months is not possible.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

Mr. Angus, you have seven minutes, please.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Kurland, one of the things that surprised me most when I was elected to Parliament was that I was going to be an immigration expert. We are the front line for all manner of cases. Over the last number of years, we used to have people we would call. They'd answer, and they were experts. We dealt with them all the time. When you are calling call centres, dealing with extremely complicated cases, when people may be deported.... I had an MP say to me, “I really feel bad for the people I dealt with in my first two years, because I was learning on the job.”

How do you see, over the last number of years, these kinds of cases? Is the federal government...? Is it getting easier or harder to walk people through the system?

[Richard Kurland]

What I have done over the years is provide quality time with “wannabe” members of Parliament of all parties, with the following: “I hope you are aware that 80% of an MP's time is dedicated to immigration issues. If you don't know it now, you certainly will know it if you are successful and proceed to Ottawa.”

What is different is that IRCC, to its great credit, does provide an in-house direct line to departmental experts who have direct access to file-specific issues. I've witnessed this sitting beside members of Parliament to watch it happen. For the public, however, internal audits continue to show an unacceptable error rate at the call centres. What happens is that you have one quality of service for the general public, which often leads individuals astray into immigration problems, driving them to the MPs, the lawyers, and the consultants. On the other hand, you have the golden thread between the members of Parliament or the senators and IRCC in-house experts with direct file access.

We need to improve that line. Frankly, we need to fully resource the members of Parliament over the years for taking on delivery of Canada's immigration program. The MPs have been swallowing those costs, rather than the department.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you for that.

I certainly think it's absolutely bizarre that a member of Parliament's office is the front-line immigration staff. When you represent a region like mine, which is bigger than the United Kingdom, there is nowhere else to go. My staff do excellent work, but it does seem to be a very bizarre use of our resources.

I want to talk about cases of marriages of convenience. We deal with all manner of marriages coming through. We deal with all kinds of delays and problems, but we have dealt with many cases that seem to come from certain red flag countries. It seems to me that the flags go up immediately with Immigration that some of these look like.... The rise of Internet wives is an issue that I see.

Mr. Kurland, how do we balance that, the right of the citizen to go down to a hot climate, fall in love on the weekend, come home, and say they want their wife, without any expectation that she is actually going to stay for more than a week?

[Richard Kurland]

I think the success model was built by IRCC in greater China. A specialized team of marriage of convenience visa officers and assorted personnel were clustered to identify and determine these kinds of cases rapidly. That team enjoyed such a success rate that the MOC, marriage of convenience, rate plummeted and processing times were able to shorten dramatically. The team shifted to other fraud areas, notably Vietnamese and Cambodians being driven out of Singapore.

What we need to do is to continue the best practices of using our highly trained officers overseas to identify and attack a trend of increasing marriages of convenience, as it appears. That's the reason for this data match deal. Tracking individual officer decisions when it comes to marriage of convenience, tracking tax and immigration information five years post-landing—these are the canaries in the coal mine to give us that signal.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Monteiro, I'm very partial to the importance of parents and grandparents coming. I was raised by my grandmothers while my parents worked. I guess the question is what the reasonable expectation is for the family on responsibility. The image we're being given is always that they come and they look after your children while you work, but we also have a very different demographic, internationally, of older parents. Some are professionals. Some may not want to live with their kids. Some may actually want to just come to Canada and live on their own. I've had cases where young families invite parents over and then say they don't want them anymore, and they're stuck.

What's the reasonable expectation on the family, and what's the reasonable expectation for parents or grandparents?

[Sheila Monteiro]

My opinion would be that there needs to be a shift away from the burden on the sponsor. The sponsors could say their parents don't want to live with them, and they're not responsible. They'll go to social assistance, so that's going to ultimately come down on the government, and that's something we do not want. I guess that's why the LICO 30% came into play. But the LICO 30% removes a lot of working poor. It's something like $73,000 if you want to sponsor two people. I don't think that's realistic. I think if a husband and wife are working, maybe they can make $45,000. I don't know these numbers, and I'm not an expert. Definitely you have expertise in that area.

I don't think they just bring the ability of looking after the grandchildren. I think they also bring the cultural values. I think they bring stuff that we cannot quantify. It's quality. It could be love. It can be affection. It can be learning how to address something. Maybe it's even teaching not only their grandchildren but maybe even their own children in a situation that maybe the parents went through and never told their kids. I think the experience that they bring as parents, as pointed out earlier—