Good afternoon. My name is Usman Mahmood. I'm a practising lawyer with CKM Law in Calgary, Alberta. I would like to begin by thanking you for having me this afternoon, as it is an honour to be speaking to you all today.
The focus of my practice is mainly immigration litigation, including but not limited to refugee claims by victims of religious and political persecution, most importantly, the Ahmadis, Shias and Christians in Pakistan, for which the Canadian government must hold such countries accountable.
I am speaking regarding the motion adopted by the committee on Tuesday, October 20. The first point was about the application backlogs. In my opinion, the application backlogs have increased significantly with the COVID closures. The case processing centres in Canada and the visa offices abroad remained closed for more than three months.
With spousal sponsorship applications, applicants are expected to provide original police clearance certificates, for example, and other original documents. However, this expectation is unrealistic at this time due to the closures and how access has been affected globally.
Processing times for temporary resident visas are presently showing a wait of about 230 days. This is exceptionally long. I am personally affected by this in that I had recently invited my mother, a resident of the U.K. with a Pakistani passport, who is her sixties, to visit me, as I am not able to leave my work to visit my aging parents. This isolation has been impacting their mental well-being.
Obviously the solution for such problems would be maybe be creating a triage system for visitors visas where the applications could be accepted on a per stage basis, case by case. If it's not something they can process, it should be rejected straight off the bat. Reopen the visa application centres globally, but obviously with health and safety in mind. Implement by-appointment-only visitors. Any interviews regarding spousal applications can be held by virtual means—by MS Teams or Zoom—and all of these different facilities can be taken into account. Implement online submission of document packages for spousal sponsorship by e-post, for example. We have to move away from paper-based applications. It's taking too long, and I'm sure it costs the government a lot of money as well.
The second part was about the lottery system and its introduction for parents' and grandparents' visas. In this lottery system, you must wait months, literally—at the moment, six months—to see if you have been picked to sponsor your parents. This is without having submitted any financial information, but only acknowledging that you are a citizen or a resident of Canada and what country your parents are residing in. There is no clarification as to what the criteria are for selection, so we are unclear about this. The minimum necessary income was reduced to match the low-income cut-off. However, if the situation remains the same around the world, this should continue for the next year, and possibly the year after that, in light of the number of job losses due to the pandemic.
A possible reply to this program is to maybe go back to the initial application process and have everyone submit their packages as they once did in 2014 and 2015. I suggest that IRCC implement more efficient and effective ways to process them. A solution may be to eliminate the lottery system and revert back to the old system. A second could be to give unsuccessful candidates not selected in the year's cut-off a queue for the next year's submissions. If someone is unsuccessful, then just refuse them straight off the bat, as opposed to making them wait for years and years. Keep the low-income cut-off income amounts in place for at least two more years, as I suggested earlier, to recover from the current economic situation.
The last point is about the temporary resident visa processing delays. The temporary resident visa, TRV, processing application centres must reopen fully, and biometric collection must resume for temporary resident visa applications, including for students and foreign workers.
The most common issue currently faced by students is the fact their acceptance letters can only be issued a certain amount of time before their entry into Canada.