Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 1st, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

[Sheila Monteiro]

We do have a culture in which we talk about looking after your elder parents.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you.

Mr. Sarai, you have seven minutes, please.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Thank you both, Ms. Monteiro and Mr. Kurland.

I'll go to you, Mr. Kurland.

I actually like your idea of tracking officers. Without strong objective evidence, I think there is a bias among some officers in certain regions, who have a tendency to say no before they say yes, so they look for a reason to say no as opposed to yes. I've looked into that as well, and there is no way to track it based on what officers are doing.

Their own performance evaluations are not done based on whether they have an 80% approval rating or a 50% refusal rating. There's no retribution, no review of their conduct. They can give 90% refusals and they'll still get the same promotion, or demotion for that matter.

I like that idea if there's a way we can track. We do it in food policies now, where food comes out and has a tracking number. We know right to the end of where it goes as well as where it originated from. So I think that's a great idea.

I think your CRA model would be helpful. It would also be helpful in tracking fraud. I like that about it.

I want to come to marriages of convenience. When you alluded to using humanitarian and compassionate grounds for the IRB officials on a review, are you referring to those marriages such as in regulation 4, which prohibits them or considers them not.... They may have kids now. There's DNA evidence. IRB officials should be able to determine that maybe it was a marriage to come into Canada. Perhaps there's no issue of genuineness in this. Is that what you are alluding to?

[Richard Kurland]

Precisely. I have active cases where, for example, unfortunately the person in the Indian subcontinent passed away, leaving a wife. The late husband's family here in Vancouver wanted the brother to marry the husband's spouse and it was blocked as a marriage of convenience. Nevertheless, over the years it was a genuine marriage. However, because of the rules—the evidentiary rules as well as the regulations—the immigration appeal division simply did not have jurisdiction to consider compassionate and humanitarian grounds.

You're faced with an evidentiary bar that rises to the level of a statutory bar, so it's up to Parliament to expressly provide the IAD with jurisdiction to consider H and C. Arbitrarily, I'm setting it at five years following an IAD determination of marriage of convenience. Keep Canada's compassionate door open in deserving cases.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

In terms of your other comment about perhaps an evidence-based method of dealing with fraudulent marriages, if the percentage of fraudulent marriages is so low—maybe one in 1,000, and I assume it's less than 1%—would there not be a better idea for those that are marriages of convenience? For example, the spouse finds out he was duped just so the bride could come into Canada—in the foreign brides or mail-order brides situation, or in arranged marriages when they have somebody else in mind, so they just want to get to Canada and then they will divorce and then bring the actual person they love. Would an evidence-based process be better, where the spouse who was duped could actually say, “Hey, I just found these emails” or “I found out that this relationship existed before the whole thing I was duped into”? It would be the same case for somebody who went to Cuba and instantly fell in love, as in the case that was mentioned, but found out that it was all a sham just to get here. Somebody could investigate that, if it were evidence-based, rather than having the whole system designed to just deal with these 0.01% of marriages.

[Richard Kurland]

Exactly. The word of the day is “baseline”.

What we can measure are trends—increasing or decreasing number of poison pen letters, or cases where within 12 months of landing under the spousal category the immigrant is sponsoring someone else as a spouse. It's that sort of measurement that will give you the trend. If the trend is stable and it's hitched to the baseline, you can take more risk. You instruct the visa officers, if in doubt, to allow more people forward. That's what's needed. The best solution is to accept risk.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

My last question in this regard is actually on queues. You said not to take more in, and I found that for live-in caregivers that's a big problem. We process 18,000 to 20,000 a year, but we were taking probably 25,000 or 30,000, resulting in the situation we heard about just before you came in where somebody was told that it would be 24 months before her mother would become a permanent resident and then it took more than 48 months. I have about 15 in my constituency who are past even 60 months.

Are you saying that we should stop the queue at the outset, so that you say we are going to take only 20,000 this year, so after 20,000 applications we won't take any more until the next fiscal year, or are you saying that we will open it up as normal when the backlog is taken back?

[Richard Kurland]

The reality check is that it's the political third rail in this country to allow for an expectation that's not delivered when it comes to the immigration of parents and grandparents.

Rather than kicking the ball down the road and hoping that this thing self-fixes in a number of years, just be honest and transparent. Just say in the first week of January, or whenever, that we're going to take in 4,000 cases—representing 8,000 persons—because we're going to reduce 12,000 from inventory.

Until you get rid of the chicken and the python, the inventory of parent and grandparent cases, you will never have predictable processing times.

That's the key. Don't take in more files in a year than you can process in a year. To do that you have to cut inventory.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Professor Kurland.

I'd like to thank the panellists for their insights today.

We will suspend for two minutes, and reconvene in camera.

[Proceedings continue in camera]