Thank you very much to the committee for having me.
My name is Dr. David Edward-Ooi Poon, founder of the Faces of Advocacy. We are a grassroots Canadian organization of over 8,700 people on a campaign to safely reunite families in Canada during the COVID-19 travel pandemic. From my understanding, we were directly responsible for the October 8 extended family and compassionate travel exemptions. We are thankful to the workers in the ministry who pulled off that task.
COVID-19 exposed a number of systemic inequalities in Canada. Immigration was not immune to that. I have maintained that I do not believe the government set out to intentionally keep families apart. I believe we just fell through the cracks. But there are some things that must not fall through the cracks. Family is one of them.
I am here to loudly and clearly make the case for collaborative, transparent immigration reform in Canada. The IRCC is using an antiquated, outdated and grossly ineffective IT structure that disproportionately affects Canadian families in a completely inconsistent manner. It is so opaque and so unwieldy that even the ministry workers who want desperately to help cannot help those they want to. This is a problem.
I am not here to berate any hard-working ministry employee. I am not convinced that these are the faults of only one minister or decision-maker. But there are significant, systemic flaws in the immigration process today. For us to fix it together, we must know how it failed—and it has failed. I want to work collaboratively with the government to address these concerns to help this government and any future governments ensure that the mistakes of the past seven months are not repeated ever again.
There are eight recommendations in our report. I will highlight five.
Number one is consistency for all. When the COVID-19 travel restrictions came in, what Canadians heard from the IRCC, CBSA, Canadian embassies, their MPs and the airlines was not consistent. My own partner was given a travel authorization by the Canadian embassy and was denied when she landed in Toronto. In times of crisis, there must be an established, structured chain of communication from the Canadian government that is uniform, widespread and publicly accessible. No one should be told one thing by one official and a completely other thing by another.
Point two is compassionate exemption. The travel restrictions began in March 2020. Compassionate exemptions were given in October 2020. There were seven months of miscarriages left unsupported, seven months of births held in solitary, seven months of cancers fought alone, and seven months of deaths without a final embrace. Donna McCall was a Canadian ICU nurse and a mother who died saying goodbye to her adult children on FaceTime. Committed partners, siblings, grandparents—I actually do understand how long that took to figure out. That was a systemic change that required a lot of different groups and different stakeholders. I understand that there were delays to get that to happen. That's why I'm so thankful to the government that it happened, albeit much later than I wanted. But in no scenario on earth is it acceptable that the NHL was allowed to play in Canada before Donna's children were allowed into the country. I state this again very clearly: NHL players were able to navigate the system of stakeholders, immigration and public safety to play in Canada—all of them foreign nationals—before the children of a dying Canadian mother were allowed into the country. This is what happened. There must be a principle that states that above any broad travel restrictions, compassionate exemptions must be publicly available and accessible to Canadians. I strongly suggest calling it “Donna's rule”.
Point three is upgraded IT infrastructure. We need a cohesive, transparent and trackable system for IRCC. The extended family exemptions opened on October 8, 2020. According to our internal tracking, about 200 of those exemptions were not approved by the promised 14-day turnaround time. The 14-day mark comes in about 24 hours. Interestingly, though, applicants after October 15 have been approved expediently, and we're thankful for that—