Thank you, Mr. Chair, and committee members, for allowing me to appear before you today.
I am not only a private citizen, but also a director of ICCRC, elected to protect the public. I am doing my elected duty. I am also an immigration consultant. I grew up in Calgary and have an MBA from Rice University. I founded a hedge fund and am currently working in New York City full-time as “that Canadian guy”.
If you hear nothing else from me today, I'd like you to hear what I'm about to say next. I am, without question, one of the harshest critics of some of the ICCRC's leadership. I can absolutely tell you that I have done a deep dive in the organization's finances and numbers, and they just do not add up. Nevertheless, ICCRC is intact and can function more efficiently if certain changes are made. There are many good people in leadership at ICCRC as well as in the organization. I can absolutely say that the problems do not lie with the general infrastructure of ICCRC, the ICCRC employees, or the immigration consultants themselves, despite the perception.
I am going to be talking about its governance from the following standpoints: the ICCRC's dicey financials; the fact that records cannot be accessed; that the disciplinary process is suffering because the organization is spending its resources protecting itself instead of the public; that discipline complaints are outsourced to a private third-party corporation; that ghost consultants who are neither Canadians nor permanent residents can now get accredited immigration practitioner diplomas; and that key positions are held by a single person—a secretary, registrar, CEO, elections officer, and there might be more.
The points that I have mentioned are a result of the unscrupulous directors and management whom I define as the “bad actors”, and who are the root cause of all the other issues we are discussing now. This is the main governance issue that is front and centre in my mind.
Removing the bad actors and keeping the good actors is easier than shutting down the regulator or starting from scratch in favour of another regulator or another entity, as there is no guarantee that any third solution will be better than where we are today.
When I decided to run for the ICCRC board, and being a financial person, I first focused on the annual reports and financial statements. All I can say is, “Wow!” The more I looked, the more I found. As I peeled the onion layer back, layer by layer, there were troubling issues at each step.
For starters, the ICCRC's equivalent of an audited certified balance sheet did not balance by $600,000, which is about 10% of the annual budget.