Good afternoon, Madam Chair. Thank you for having us as witnesses.
I am a lawyer at Don Valley Community Legal Clinic. We are one of the bigger clinics. We merged two former clinics, Flemingdon Community Legal Services and East Toronto Legal Services. We are funded by legal aid.
We have quite a large population in our area. Some of our clients include clients living in the Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon areas. These areas have seen quite a number of COVID-19 cases, which of course has impacted our ability to provide services to our clients. We understand the uniqueness of these circumstances, and I do acknowledge that IRCC has been quite flexible in allowing extensions and has been understanding of submissions and other documents. The Niagara Falls office especially has been very good to us. However, a lot of our clients are still stuck in limbo because of the impact COVID-19 has had on IRCC services.
We think it would be helpful if IRCC would focus their attention on providing resources for several areas. As everyone has mentioned in previous presentations and in this presentation, processing times have gone through the roof. We think there are certain circumstances where IRCC could expedite applications, especially for overseas family members, such as those who are waiting for permanent residence and who are protected persons or family members such as spouses or dependent children.
It would be good if IRCC provided a clear set of criteria for officers to expedite applications from the get-go. Whether it's severe mental health issues or physical risks to family members overseas, we think it would be good if IRCC could establish criteria so officers could expedite applications without our having to advocate or resort to temporary resident permits, which are almost always rejected.
We think there needs to be a clearer, more defined policy regarding dual intent. For instance, spouses who are waiting overseas can apply for a TRP and enter Canada while they wait for their applications to be processed. We have a number of our clients who have family members with pending spousal sponsorship applications being rejected for a TRP application because the officer seems to ignore the fact that a spousal application is pending, even when mental health issues are involved.
One of the things we see with temporary foreign workers is the need for a relaxation of LMIA requirements. There are a lot of temporary foreign workers here, especially caregivers, who have been in Canada for years working on work permits. The process of getting an LMIA has been impacted by COVID-19. We think IRCC should look into relaxing the requirement for these workers to get an LMIA. Maybe they could issue short-term—say, one year—COVID-affected work permits so these employees can support themselves and find work.
A number of applications have been submitted since March. We know that biometrics have been slowly coming back online but they are not up to the speed they were before. It would be really good if IRCC would continue processing other aspects of the application, like medicals and security clearances, instead of applications being put on hold while medicals and security clearances expire and clients have to do these things all over again and spend a lot of money. It would be really helpful if there could be concurrent processing of all these different areas of the application.
Temporary foreign workers are very much impacted by COVID-19. We have a large number of caregivers in our area. A lot of these caregivers have either applied for permanent residence under the interim program or are applying under the new pilot.
A lot of our clients do not have work permits—