Okay.
There are two grounds of inadmissibility under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. One is danger to the public, which really doesn't arise very often. I see cases of people who have tuberculosis. If it's active, they have to get treated before they come to Canada. If it's not active, then they are put under surveillance and they have to follow treatment once they arrive. It's very infrequent that people are refused on the grounds of danger to the public.
The more common ground is excessive demand on social and/or medical services. It's interesting to note that the law was changed some years ago, because excessive demand used to apply in all cases involving all applicants for permanent residence, but the Parliament of Canada decided to exempt spouses, dependent children, and protected persons from the excessive demand criteria, a reflection of the fact that the government thought that it was important that those people be allowed to come in and be reunited with their families. Excessive demand now is a ground applied mostly in the case of parents and grandparents, and also in the case of independent or economic migrants who seek to come to Canada.
Several issues have arisen in relation to this process. The first was exposed recently by a reporter for one of the news networks, who discovered that the calculation of average and excessive demand—excessive demand means you cost more than the average amount of money that a regular Canadian would cost—were based on fictitious information. There was no actual true calculation of the cost for the average person, so one issue that needs to be carefully studied by the committee is how authorities come to the number they apply in all of the cases. The reporter discovered that there was absolutely no factual basis for it.
There are other important issues that need to be considered when one considers excessive demand, and those deal with the hardship that often results from the indiscriminate application of these criteria. For example, one of the most common types of cases I see in my office involves people who are trying to bring their parents into the country, and they have medical issues, and they're unable to bring them. This creates huge problems. It creates emotional issues, because people feel that as their parents get older, they have to care for them. The application of the excessive demand criteria, in this context, creates a huge amount of emotional hardship.
The second thing we need to consider when we consider the excessive demand criteria is the fact that they are also applied in the case of economic immigrants. One of the things we need to consider is that, as the demographics of the world change, Canada is a country that needs immigrants in order to meet our demographic needs over the next 40 or 50 years, and we are competing with other countries that find themselves in the same situation. Canada needs to understand that putting up barriers that make it more difficult for the more attractive immigrants to come to the country may have a negative impact on our ability to attract the most qualified immigrants.
From the point of view of an excessive demand analysis, one also has to engage in a cost-benefit analysis. This requires us to consider the emotional hardship that occurs when people are separated from their families, and also requires us to consider the impact of a strict application of the excessive demand criteria on our ability to attract the most desirable immigrants as we move forward.
I think that when you consider the medical inadmissibility over the next weeks, you need to consider these issues, and consider whether or not, in fact, we need to reconsider the inflexible approach we've seen applied by the officials to excessive demand over the course of the last many years, and either get rid of the whole notion of medical inadmissibility—because from a cost-benefit point of view, it doesn't make any sense—or at least guarantee that there's a much more flexible approach that will take into account the hardship that arises as a result of an inflexible approach; and also the fact that we may be harming ourselves by making it more difficult to attract the types of immigrants that we will need in the years ahead.