Thank you, Madam Chair.
I speak as a lay employee of the Roman Catholic Diocese. I'm competent to talk about our past and present practices in refugee resettlement, but my opinions are mine alone and do not represent the policies of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon.
I have been involved with refugee resettlement in some way or another as a volunteer since the 1990s and professionally since 2017.
IRCC is to be commended for the progress it has made in improving the PSR application process. Bear in mind that the refugee caseload for them has quadrupled since 2014. We saw good changes prior to COVID. We saw email submission of applications with immediate auto-confirmation of receipt, the development of the refugee sponsorship training program, the creation of the e-CAS system that allows sponsors to check online about a case's progress, and processing times were coming down nicely. Then came COVID, and everything, as you know, changed.
I was pleasantly surprised that IRCC kept the doors open for new refugee applications all the way through 2020 and 2021. Arrivals began to happen, and then came Afghanistan, and then came Ukraine.
As a result of all three crises, the improvements in processing times that had been made were, of course, damaged and reversed. Sponsorship agreement holders were not allowed to submit any new PSR applications this year before May. That puts pressure on our whole system and increases wait times for the refugees in our queues.
Once again, it is taking months, not weeks, for ROC-O to do their initial processing on new applications. There's lots of uncertainty there.
We really miss the mission-specific reports that gave current information about conditions and average processing times for each visa office. It continues to be hard to get timely decisions on less straightforward applications such as those involving de facto dependents and one-year windows.
There are some bright spots, though. Some overseas visa offices seem to be working very hard to clear their backlog of older, stuck cases. The record for us is somebody who started out in 2013, and she will be with us by October 7.
Communication with ROC-O is now often coming with an officer identifier. That sounds small, but it's big because it means that we can be sure that our communications are getting to the right person rather than a faceless inbox. IRCC staff have become more responsive to the SAH community, and senior staff seem more willing to intervene when we hit a brick wall.
How can the system and processing times be improved? Everybody hates the backlog. My first point is that we need to scrap the judicial review system. This is causing endless problems. The judicial review process doesn't work well; it only responds to procedure. It ties up applications for years, and it's very expensive. All you get if you win is another trip back to the same visa office.
I would like to see it replaced with a proper appeal system, streamlined and effective, to get over the heartache that is caused to so many families by being bogged down in judicial review forever.
My other suggestions are that the increased staffing levels, which are already functioning at ROC-O, need to be continued, maybe for some years to come, in order to cope with all the people who want to be processed. There needs to be an increase in both the numbers and staffing of overseas visa offices, particularly in Africa, where the highest demand is and where the most crises happen.
Finally, we need to roll out the promised digital application system, which would greatly improve the cybersecurity of our application process.
Thank you.