Evidence of meeting #84 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was costs.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Lorne Waldman  Barrister and Solicitor, Lorne Waldman and Associates, As an Individual
John Rae  First Vice-Chair, Council of Canadians with Disabilities
Brent Diverty  Vice-President, Programs, Canadian Institute for Health Information
Michael Battista  Barrister and Solicitor, Jordan Battista LLP
Adrienne Smith  Barrister and Solicitor, Jordan Battista LLP
Maurice Tomlinson  Senior Policy Analyst, Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network
Meagan Johnston  Staff Lawyer, HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario
Mercedes Benitez  As an Individual
Toni Schweitzer  Staff Lawyer, Parkdale Community Legal Services
Clerk of the Committee  Ms. Erica Pereira

7:25 p.m.

Vice-President, Programs, Canadian Institute for Health Information

Brent Diverty

No. I don't have any such number. We track administration costs for health care overall. They're roughly about 2%, but that's largely ministries of health. It doesn't include the administrative costs of organizations, but I don't have a number specifically for what you're looking for.

7:25 p.m.

Conservative

Larry Maguire Conservative Brandon—Souris, MB

Someone mentioned earlier the costs of family reunification and the costs of the family impacts. I happen to come, Mr. Waldman, from Manitoba. You mentioned it earlier. There's a situation of human capital involved here, where the families can't get on with their regular lives because they're so busy worrying about the person in the family who has this disability, and they need to be able to deal with that locally and in their own family. In this case, the person was trained in a particular occupation that was deemed to be a fairly high-paying occupation, I would say, and they're working in one here in Canada now at a much lower rate. Because they have been held up for six years, or some years, to become permanent residents of Canada, they can't even train to get the upgrading they need to go back to their previous profession.

This is a detriment to the community they live in because there is a very big need for the person's skills in that area. The town has come together fully to adopt and accept this young person into the school system, into the community, yet there's still a situation here a few years later that we're dealing with.

Can you comment on that whole human capital part of it?

7:25 p.m.

Barrister and Solicitor, Lorne Waldman and Associates, As an Individual

Lorne Waldman

I think what we're seeing—and your case shows this—are a lot of situations where people who have a huge amount to contribute to Canada are not able to do that. Either they can't come because of the medical issues, or they have to spend so much of their time worrying about dealing with the problems of the people who aren't able to come that they're not able to make the contributions.

When you factor that in, and you add to that the limited amount of money we're going to save, I think we have to seriously rethink this whole process.

In terms of the costing, I think if you ask the officials at immigration, they do have to do a costing for the application process. I would expect that they probably could provide you with a figure as to how much it costs for the medical processing.

7:25 p.m.

Conservative

Larry Maguire Conservative Brandon—Souris, MB

Thank you.

7:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Mr. Rae.

7:25 p.m.

First Vice-Chair, Council of Canadians with Disabilities

John Rae

I'm glad that—

7:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

You have 10 seconds. You can do it.

7:25 p.m.

First Vice-Chair, Council of Canadians with Disabilities

John Rae

You raise an interesting example. I wish we could get back to discussions about the humanity here rather than just the overall cost. I think settlement organizations can help us a lot. I think your example shows how community creativity can help mitigate some of the perceived costs and can help individuals settle in our country.

7:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Thank you, Mr. Rae.

We have time for two minutes from Mr. Erskine-Smith.

7:25 p.m.

Liberal

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON

Thanks very much.

Mr. Waldman, you made the fairness point about hardship, and Mr. Rae reiterated just now that it's dehumanizing, in many ways, to reduce a person to a number. But you also made the point that as a society we are losing otherwise contributing new members of our society by virtue of this analysis.

Just as a clarification point, when the excessive demand consideration is made, that's just in relation to the one individual, not a holistic consideration of the family as a whole and the contributions that other families would make. That's correct, right?

7:30 p.m.

Barrister and Solicitor, Lorne Waldman and Associates, As an Individual

Lorne Waldman

Yes, that's right. That's a problem.

7:30 p.m.

Liberal

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON

Second, in your experience, of the 900 applicants—a tiny fraction of the total immigration number—that you deal with specifically and have dealt with in the course of your career, how often is just a single individual coming where there isn't a contributing member in the same way, or to the same degree, in the excessive demand rejections?

7:30 p.m.

Barrister and Solicitor, Lorne Waldman and Associates, As an Individual

Lorne Waldman

I'll point out that there are two categories. One category is the parents and grandparents. Usually you have the parents, with maybe one parent who is inadmissible and the other who is not. In the economic category, often several people are contributing, with maybe one child who has an issue. That can be the impediment. Those are the cases that are really problematic from a practical point of view.

I want to clarify that I agree with Mr. Rae in terms of the moral issues involved, but I'm trying to appeal to your practical notion of what makes sense economically as well.

7:30 p.m.

Liberal

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON

Thanks for making the case. The fairness point is important. The economic considerations would then underline the support, hopefully.

I know you publish in this area, and other jurisdictions face similar questions. Do they have similar answers, or have they moved away from categorizations like excessive demand?

7:30 p.m.

Barrister and Solicitor, Lorne Waldman and Associates, As an Individual

Lorne Waldman

I think it depends on the country. I think a lot of countries are proving to be much more flexible. Canada has to start worrying about the fact that we're competing, and we're going to lose good immigrants.

7:30 p.m.

Liberal

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON

Do you have examples of model countries in this regard?

7:30 p.m.

Barrister and Solicitor, Lorne Waldman and Associates, As an Individual

Lorne Waldman

I'll send them to you.

7:30 p.m.

Liberal

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON

Okay.

Thanks very much.

7:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Thank you very much.

Thank you to our panel of witnesses. You've set the bar high for the next panel. We thank you for your time.

We'll take a few minutes to change our panel.

7:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

We'll reconvene. Could I have everyone take their seats?

I know you're happy to be here, so let's begin. We will start with Michael Battista and Adrienne Smith.

Mr. Battista, I believe you are going to begin.

7:35 p.m.

Michael Battista Barrister and Solicitor, Jordan Battista LLP

Yes. Thank you very much.

We're very pleased to be here. We're very pleased that the committee is looking into this very important issue.

7:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

Could I have people's attention, please? I would like members to please take their seats.

Thank you.

7:35 p.m.

Barrister and Solicitor, Jordan Battista LLP

Michael Battista

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Michael Battista, and I'm joined by my colleague Adrienne Smith, from Jordan Battista LLP.

We really consider ourselves, among the bar, as being medical inadmissibility specialists. We do a lot of this work. Our expertise really started in dealing with cases of applicants with HIV, but it has now expanded to cover a broad range of health and social services. Medical inadmissibility files are about 20% of what our office does, and I wanted to start off by talking about wait-lists for a moment.

Wait-lists are a little bit of a red herring. We have seen hundreds of procedural fairness letters in our office, and I can't think of one letter that has relied on wait-lists, or increase in wait-lists, to justify a refusal on medical inadmissibility grounds. Part of this is the problem the government has in justifying, or pointing to an applicant who would significantly increase a wait-list such that it would increase morbidity or mortality of Canadians.

Our main point is that paragraph 38(1)(c) is not sound public policy, and this is aside from the constitutional issues. This is aside from the anguish that it causes people. I want to reiterate what Mr. Waldman was referring to before. If we just look at cost alone, it's very questionable that this provision actually saves money. If we look at fixing the provision, the provision will be very expensive to fix.

First of all, let's look at the unlikely cost savings. Let's take the high-water mark of $27 million. That's the figure government witnesses were using to say what the savings were. We have really strong concerns about this figure. We think it is artificially high, but for the sake of argument, let's use the $27-million figure. We urge the committee to look at the costs of enforcing and administering this provision, and to take that into account to see whether there is, in fact, a net savings in administering and enforcing this provision. This provision really deals with layers and layers of government administration and decision-making.

I'm going to give you some costs that you might want to consider. One is the cost of panel physicians, worldwide, who are the first assessors of this information. There's usually a back and forth between family doctors and panel physicians. There are regional medical offices. There's the central medical admissibility unit here in Ottawa that's responsible for preparing the procedural fairness letters, researching costs. There are visa officers who have to deal with whether to uphold the findings of the central medical inadmissibility unit. These visa officers not only make those decisions, but they often have to deal with requests for waivers on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. They deal with requests for temporary resident permits. All of those costs have to be factored in.

In our office, we challenge these findings on a regular basis. There are also the costs of proceedings before the immigration appeal division. There are costs in Federal Court. When you're in litigation, costs rise dramatically.

I urge the committee to consider all of these costs, weigh them against that $27-million figure, and really determine whether, in fact, this figure is saving public resources. Our feeling, our gut instinct, is that there are actually probably very little savings here, and in fact, there's probably a net cost in terms of public resources.

I'm going to touch on the mitigation plan. Mitigation plans are done by applicants. They frequently pay us to construct these mitigation plans for them. They're really designed to ensure the government knows that a particular applicant won't access the services that are feared to present an excessive demand. The problem with these mitigation plans is that they basically disappear. They evaporate after a permanent resident becomes a permanent resident, so there's no enforcement at all of these mitigation plans even though they're relied on heavily to approve permanent residence for applicants. It's entirely possible that individuals who have been approved on the basis of a mitigation plan for whatever reason—for a change of circumstances, for instance—actually access those resources the government has assumed they wouldn't access. There's very little recourse from this.

We are not advocating that an enforcement scheme be put into place to enforce these mitigation plans, because I think that would just cost more public resources. Any time you set up an enforcement scheme, you're just sinking public dollars into a system.

Overall, I think it's very questionable whether this provision saves the government any money. I think it's probably more possible that it's costing the government money and the mitigation plans are very ineffective in assuring the government that excessive demands are not accessed.

I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Smith to talk about procedural fairness letters.

7:40 p.m.

Adrienne Smith Barrister and Solicitor, Jordan Battista LLP

As Michael said, our firm really does specialize in representing people who deal with medical admissibility issues, so I want to focus on two examples from our practice where we've seen these real problems with procedural fairness letters.

One problem is the fact that this excessive demand threshold, which is currently set at $6,655 a year, is not accurate. We saw that the Global News investigation from July 2017 found that IRCC isn't even considering the social service costs. They're costing it at $356 per Canadian per year. That number doesn't include special education services, which we know are required by one-third of the people that we're talking about under medical inadmissibility. I think there's a real problem with the number. As Michael said, the resources that the IRCC would have to pour into making this number accurate are going to be significant, so we're coming to the situation now of “is this a system that's even worth saving?”

This number of $6,655 per year is really important. It means everything to the client. If you're one dollar over this number, it makes you inadmissible to Canada.

We had a case recently in our office where the IRCC said the cost of our client's HIV medication was $400 over the excessive demand threshold. Our client had an advanced degree. He had years of management experience at an international accounting firm, and there was no opportunity to take into account the fact that he would contribute significantly to the Canadian tax base. The interesting thing is that his desirability as an immigrant to Canada was really reduced to this $400 over the $6,655 per year.

The second example that I want to give from our practice deals with the discriminatory nature of this section of the law. The IRCC has repeatedly stated that medical inadmissibility is tied to the cost of services, not to the health condition, but if every single child with a disability is getting one of these procedural fairness letters, then in fact it is de facto discriminatory.

We're questioning the implementation of this law. We're urging the committee to repeal it. You'll hear from other witnesses, and we've heard from the panel before us, that this is a system that discriminates against persons with disabilities.

In 2015 we represented the mother of a 14-year-old teenager named Jazmine. She was found inadmissible because she was deaf. Her case was heavily publicized in the media. The procedural fairness letter that Jazmine's mother received essentially said that her daughter would be a burden on Canada. I think the sad part about this is that Jazmine's disability really is just one part of her identity, but IRCC saw this as the only relevant part of her identity.

I think it is discriminatory to see persons with disabilities as a burden. If you speak to any parent who has a child with a disability, you can see the positive change and impact they have on their families and their communities. Jazmine's mother worked for seven years in Canada. She paid taxes every single year. I met Jazmine last year in Vancouver, and she's thriving in her school. She has so many friends. It's one of those situations where she really isn't a burden on the social system; she's attending a public school in B.C. Jazmine and her mother should never have been subjected to this discriminatory process.

7:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant

I'm going to need to get you to wrap it up.