Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Sept. 27th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 32 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Today, we will continue our study on application backlogs and processing times.

I would like to welcome our witnesses for this panel today. In our first panel, we are joined by Rabea Allos, director, Catholic Refugee Sponsors' Council; Vikram Khurana, chairman, Toronto Business Development Centre; and Oliver Thorne from the Veterans Transition Network.

All witnesses will have five minutes for their opening remarks. Then we will go into rounds of questioning.

I would request that Rabea Allos, director of the Catholic Refugee Sponsors Council, please begin.

You will have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Rabea Allos, Director, Catholic Refugee Sponsors' Council]

Good afternoon to you all.

I would like to thank you for the kind invitation. I am honoured to be here today to speak on behalf of the Catholic Refugee Sponsors' Council.

In the time I have today, I would like to talk about retention, immigration applications and lessons to learn with respect to the PSR program backlogs.

Immigration is one of the most important sectors of the Canadian economy. Immigrants are needed to keep our economy growing and keep the Canadian pension fund afloat. IRCC recently proposed immigration targets of 500,000 immigrants per year to achieve this growth. The immigration targets have been increasing over the years, and this increase influences the backlog levels. Immigration targets are directly related to the number of Canadians and permanent residents leaving Canada on an annual basis. The higher this number is, the lower the retention rate of the Canada immigration intake is. Studies have suggested that retention levels are as high as 50% of the immigration levels.

IRCC never discloses retention numbers, and we do not know how effective and efficient immigration policies are. Retentions are very important to audit, first, to optimize the effectiveness of IRCC programs, and second, to know which immigration stream is more efficient. Knowing which stream has higher retention would give government direction on where to direct immigration policies. Low retention rates lead directly to higher backlogs. IRCC is obligated to inflate the annual landing targets to 500,000 to cover the economic loss of about 200,000 immigrants or Canadians leaving Canada annually. If that many are leaving, what good are the rules and administrations? Optimizing immigration retentions is very important in order to have a successful and efficient immigration program and hence reduce the load on IRCC processing.

The other issue that could be affecting the backlogs is how many applications are being submitted annually by the immigration industry to IRCC. If application numbers are exceeding the immigration targets by large numbers, those backlogs will keep growing. This issue was a big problem in the private sponsorship program until 2010. The refugee sponsorship applications exceeded the refugee targets by multiple times. Sponsors were flooding the system with applications, and waiting times in some visa offices exceeded 10 years.

Back then, IRCC introduced the quota system for sponsorship agreement holders, SAHs, to limit the application intake and make it closer to the refugee intake. This forced SAHs to sponsor vulnerable refugees who passed the IRCC standards and ensured that the applications were completed properly. This could be a solution if IRCC is being flooded with applications far beyond the capacity of the intake target. Other solutions could be to have a moratorium on applications until the backlog is cleared or to follow other countries' practice of limiting how long the application would be in the backlog before closing the file and requiring a new application.

In some cases, backlogs are influenced by political interference, particularly in the case of refugee application backlogs. Political interference in the priorities of the selection process cause delays in the processing of vulnerable refugees around the world. For example, the recent prioritizing of Afghan and Ukrainian refugees limited the processing of refugees across the world.

Backlogs are troublesome to the sponsors because the sponsors do depend on volunteers. Those volunteers are involved with the refugees even before the application process. When those volunteers see that the process is taking too long, they lose interest and they're not interested in working on this. In many cases they're working with the refugee family, and after a couple of years the refugee family ends up accepting refugee status in Sweden, Australia or New Zealand and abandons their application and the whole effort of the refugee is lost.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Mr. Allos.

We will now proceed to Mr. Vikram Khurana, chairman of the Toronto Business Development Centre.

Mr. Khurana, you have the floor. You will have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Vikram Khurana, Chairman, Toronto Business Development Centre]

Thank you, Madam Chair. It's an honour to join you today.

As a first-generation immigrant who came to Canada as an international student, I am thankful to Canada and the opportunities afforded me to establish a successful global businesses as an entrepreneur and for being able to be in a position to help create thousands of jobs for Canadians.

Today, I speak to you as the chair of the Toronto Business Development Centre, also know as TBDC, a not-for-profit Toronto incubator that was established 32 years ago. Since our founding, we have helped over 9,000 entrepreneurs establish or scale their businesses. We have established with the City of Brampton a partnership called BHive, which is the city's premier international incubator intended to attract global entrepreneurs. We've also been chosen by the Government of Ontario to help promote, recruit and matchmake a hundred immigrant entrepreneurs with economic opportunities throughout Ontario under the Ontario immigrant nominee program.

As someone who believes in the potential of newcomer entrepreneurs, I want to use this time to speak to the challenges facing our economic immigration program and zero in on the start-up visa program, also known as the SUV program.

The objective of the start-up visa program was to help international entrepreneurs with innovative or disruptive business ideas come to Canada to establish and scale their start-ups in Canada. Through these start-ups, Canada would benefit from well-paid jobs, growing exports and rapidly scaling companies. Canada was the first country to establish this creative program and has indeed benefited from a number of successes in attracting international entrepreneurs to Canada. It has demonstrably contributed to creating jobs and exports and to growing our ecosystem in Canada.

Due to the current backlog, the program does have challenges. It has been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Permanent residency applications under the SUV program, as per the IRCC website, are currently at 31 months, while that was intended to be around 12 months. There's a big backlog.

Many applicants have applied for work permits now, but the processing is longer than even a year for some of the countries, and many quality applicants are being refused. To put this in simple perspective, if a future Shopify founder is a South American, an Indian or a Nigerian and is waiting for multiple years to come to Canada, how long could we realistically expect them to wait before they go somewhere else? There are now 5,000 applications in the queue for the SUV program, and there are many designated entities that have a lower standard of care when approving nominations, which adds to the waiting times for legitimate entrepreneurs nominated by entities that exercise a higher degree of care in the nomination.

Those founders who arrived on work permits have been waiting years for permanent residence and have had to renew their work permits in order to continue their business operations in Canada. This was not the intent. Those remaining are still in the bottleneck. Many of these founders have raised their concerns of leaving the program entirely due to the lengthy process, with no light foreseeable at the end of the tunnel.

I have a few recommendations.

First, under the minister's authorities, IRCC should establish a SWAT team to tackle a percentage of the growing backlog by a set date: for example, 50% of SUV applicants by December 2022.

Next, to bring down the start-up visa program backlog, IRCC can implement strategies to check if applicants are adhering to arriving in Canada in the spirit of the legislation. A good example of that would be a pre-screening strategy that would allow IRCC to ask applicants to declare if they are investors of the same fund that they received capital from.

A temporary public policy to facilitate a limited number of work permits for foreign nationals outside Canada under the SUV program, submitted via each designated entity, would allow for permanent residency applications to be processed from within Canada.

A milestone process to expedite applications to the top would ensure that bad players aren't provided the opportunity to misuse the SUV program and would further ensure that the most prosperous companies get to come to Canada and help our economy.

An enhanced dedicated service channel, or a concierge line, to help designated entities troubleshoot process issues on behalf of the entrepreneurs could also serve as a knowledge hub for frontline visa officers due to the unique nature of each of these applications.

We should also focus on governance and enforcement. We should review designated entities and ensure that program objectives are being met to assist innovative companies, that integrity measures are in place and that IRCC de-designates those who are breaching their privileges.

Finally, it's time to get rid of paper SUV applications and go digital. We must process electronically.

In closing, Madam Chair and esteemed members of this committee, I do not need to underscore the value of immigration to our pandemic recovery and future economic growth. We need transparency and accountability immediately. It is a failure of our public-facing institutions to provide little or no information to our future Canadians or to partners of governments who stand ready to help.

If we speak with a newcomer in a queue, it is not always the length of waiting that is harmful; it is often the lack of information and a road map that is more frustrating. We all recognize the hard work of staff—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Mr. Khurana, but your time is up.

You will get an opportunity to talk further when we go into our round of questioning.

We will now proceed to Mr. Oliver Thorne, representing the Veterans Transition Network.

Mr. Thorne, the floor is yours. You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Oliver Thorne, Executive Director, Veterans Transition Network]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here and speak with you today. My name is Oliver Thorne. I currently serve as executive director of the Veterans Transition Network, a registered Canadian charity headquartered here in Vancouver. It operates counselling programs for Canadian Forces veterans across the country. We have been pursuing that mission for 10 years.

In July and August of 2021, we were approached by a group of veterans who are assisting Afghan interpreters in their attempts to come to Canada with the impending fall of the Afghan government and takeover by the Taliban. For the past year, we have been assisting with those efforts, directly providing financial supports, safe housing supports and evacuations for applicants to the special immigration measures program. My comments today around the immigration backlog will specifically focus on those Afghan applicants to the special immigration measures program.

My points today are really centred around the idea that there is a real and significant cost to the backlog and processing times for applications within IRCC. We have seen the direct cost at three levels—to future Afghan Canadians, to Canadian veterans and to the charitable organizations that support both of those groups.

First, application backlogs are traumatizing future Canadians and ensuring that their transition into Canadian life is more difficult. To give a sense of why this is the case, we know from working with Canadian veterans for over 20 years that navigating a significant life transition is very difficult in the face of trauma and uncertainty. For Afghans who have applied to the special immigration measures program, they are living with trauma and uncertainty on a daily basis. Many of these individuals served with the Canadian Forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

In August of last year, many of them moved from Kandahar to Kabul in an attempt to get on evacuation flights out of the country. In order to do that, many of them left behind their jobs. They left their homes and their support networks. They moved from Kandahar to Kabul, and in doing so, they sent a very clear message to these small and tight-knit communities they left behind about the fact that they worked with the Canadian Forces. Because of that, many of them are now regularly moving locations in an attempt to stay undetected. They are unable to engage with the community and with opportunities around them for fear of reprisals by the Taliban.

For many of them, their children are not in school. They are unable to work. They are unable to access what limited services the Government of Afghanistan may have to offer them. Things like the justice system, medical care and other services they cannot access for fear of their detection by the Taliban. This means that every day is stressful, traumatic and uncertain for them.

These are future Canadians who will be coming to Canada. Those impacts will be felt by our systems once they arrive here. Our medical system will have to deal with chronic, untreated physical injuries and post-traumatic psychological injuries. Our education system will have to help thousands of Afghan children who have been out of education for a year to catch up on their schooling. Our social services will be strained by the effects of family trauma that could span across multiple generations. For each day that these folks stay in Afghanistan, uncertain about their future, this problem compounds and compounds. It will be felt once they arrive here in Canada. Their transition to being Canadian citizens will be much more difficult as a result.

First and foremost, it is the morally right thing to do to expedite the applications of these Afghans who supported our Canadian Forces during our mission there from 2001 to 2014. Failing that, it is the sensible thing to do for our government to expedite these applications.

I'll move on to my second point. The application backlog is also damaging to the mental health of Canadian veterans. Throughout our programs last year and in 2020, we have seen the impact of the fall of Afghanistan on the mental health and well-being of Canada's veterans, to the point that our clinical network has held special consultations to prepare to deal with this issue. We've notified our peer support network across Canada that this issue may arise in veterans' communities. We've sent many, many messages to veterans in our network across multiple platforms, letting them know that help is available if they are dealing with challenging feelings and emotions as a result of the fall of Afghanistan.

Beyond that, for the past year, many veterans have been the primary advocate and support for their Afghan interpreter colleagues whom they worked with overseas. They have been providing emotional support, and paperwork and administrative support. In many cases, they have been providing financial support. This is coming at a—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Mr. Thorne, but your time is up. You will get an opportunity to talk further when we go into our round of questioning.

With that, I want to thank all the witnesses for their opening remarks.

Now we will go to our round of questioning. We will begin with Mr. Genuis.

You have six minutes.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for appearing before us on this very important study.

I'm going to start with some questions for Mr. Allos, and they may take up all of my time.

Could you share a bit about the impact of backlogs on private sponsoring organizations? We've heard about delays of three years or more. I would imagine that when you have a community group that establishes a relationship with a family, that family is in a fragile or dangerous situation, and then they have to wait years, trying to maintain contact while they wait for the application to be processed. I imagine that can be a very difficult and stressful experience on both sides.

Could you share a bit more about what you've been hearing from different organizations that are involved in sponsorship?

[Rabea Allos]

Most organizations, including the Catholic and non-Catholic sponsors, are going through the same thing. Most of the work on the ground is being done by volunteers. Those volunteers are doing it because they feel good about it, but dealing with the backlogs is stressing them out.

You work with a family for a few years, and then you find out that they're not coming in. In one case, there was a family in Africa, a single mother with three kids. She has cancer. They are in a refugee camp, and she cannot get treatment locally. If IRCC does not expedite the case, she'll end up dying and there will be three orphans in the camp.

The volunteers just can't deal with it anymore. Eventually, they leave. If you have fewer volunteers, you cannot sponsor as many refugees as you would hope to.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

To put a very fine point on that, and it's a very useful point, is it fair to say that you're seeing declining engagement from volunteers who would potentially be involved in the area of sponsoring refugees, and that it's driven by frustration in dealing with the delays and the bureaucratic nature of the process that they are coming up against? These volunteers are trying to help, but they're encountering roadblocks from the government in the process.

[Rabea Allos]

Certainly. Processing times are only one thing, but there are other issues with the regulations that are being imposed on sponsors. Volunteers are just not interested anymore.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you. That's important testimony for us to take note of.

You spoke about how the prioritization of some groups displaces other groups. Sometimes politicians would like to pretend that there isn't scarcity when there is.

The government often says when they're putting in a new priority in response to a new crisis that it won't affect any other existing applications. That has been the talking point from the government.

Do you find that believable? What are your reflections when you hear the government say that they can respond to crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine without them impacting other situations?

[Rabea Allos]

No, of course not. We can see the delays are there.

I've checked back. In 2015 and 2016, when the Syrian refugees became a priority, resources were pulled from different visa offices across the world and moved over to Syria and Turkey so that they could get the 25,000 Syrians within a few months. Refugees across the rest of the world were left hanging.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Right. When the government puts resources into one place, then often, despite saying otherwise, they are pulling those resources from somewhere else. It seems that one proposal for dealing with this would be to simply increase the overall level of resources that are in processing and take those resources from somewhere else. One possible route might be reducing the amount of money spent on direct public sponsorship and putting more into the processing of private sponsorships. That would probably increase the number of people who could be sponsored overall, because you'd be leveraging more in the way of private dollars.

Another proposal that Conservatives put forward in the last election was to allow people to pay a little bit extra for expedited processing just to put more money into the system for expanded processing.

What are your thoughts on measures to increase the amount of resources that are available for processing?

[Rabea Allos]

Well, from the past, whenever you increase resources, you're going to load the system again. It's better to optimize our system. There are about 200,000 to 250,000 Canadians or permanent residents who are leaving Canada on an annual basis, so—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting. The time is up for Mr. Genuis.

We will now proceed to Mr. Ali.

You have six minutes, Mr. Ali, for your round of questioning.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank all the witnesses for providing us with the benefit of their knowledge and experience today as we study application backlogs and processing times.

First of all, Mr. Khurana, I would like to thank you and the Toronto Business Development Centre for your initiative with the City of Brampton and its economic development department's BHive incubator program. Using our government's start-up visa program, you are helping newcomer entrepreneurs to grow and scale in the Canadian ecosystem.

I want to ask you about your experience with the start-up visa program. I understand that this program is implemented by IRCC with the National Angel Capital Organization. Could you elaborate further on what steps could be taken to help expedite bringing good companies here faster? How can we best assist programs like Brampton's BHive become leading incubators for international start-ups and attracting international entrepreneurs?

[Vikram Khurana]

Thank you, Member Ali. I really appreciate your question, sir.

First and foremost, we are very, very bullish about foreign entrepreneurs coming to Canada and setting up the next Google, the next Facebook, the next YouTube and all these kinds of very well-known companies right from inception in Canada. That's what this program was supposed to do.

Since this is a program that supports job creation, economic activity, and a number of fringe benefits for the economy, this should be addressed as a priority stream. The reason it should be addressed as a priority stream is that this is the only economic immigration program federally. The prior version of the owner-operator program was sunsetted by IRCC. Quite a few of the applications have ended up in the start-up visa program, which was originally intended to bring innovative and disruptive companies to Canada.

Some of the steps, obviously, are that NACO, the National Angel Capital Organization, should help IRCC weed out the bad actors and de-designate incubators or angel organizations or VCs that are using this program as an immigration program.

The second step we could do is ask the designated entities which companies are their top companies and which companies they feel will be able to make a quick impact and a positive impact in Canada and have a high potential of succeeding.

Finally, even if permanent residence applications cannot be processed on a priority basis, perhaps the work permits can be done on a priority basis. This will help people come to Canada and immediately start as opposed to waiting for first the work permit and then the PR.

We think these are some quick fixes to the problem of the backlogs.

[Shafqat Ali, Liberal, Brampton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Khurana.

You just mentioned some bad actors and you also mentioned earlier that there are 5,000 applications and that the waiting time is about 32 months. Can you elaborate further on the bad actors? Also, do you think this could be a reason it's taking more time for IRCC to verify whether these are genuine applications from these actors? Could you elaborate on that, please?

[Vikram Khurana]

Thank you for that question.

That definitely is the case. The program originally when it was in its pilot stage had only 500 spots. Since the owner-operator program was sunset, many of the applicants, because of the lack of clarity as to what a start-up actually means, have been shuffled into this category, which has resulted in the 5,000 applications. In the grand scheme of things, when you are talking 400,000 or 500,000 as an annual quota, that's still not very large, but if there are problematic applications in the system that require a fair amount of due diligence on the part of the immigration officer, that slows the system down. Hence, it's important to stop the bad actors.

These bad actors can be of two types. One is applicants who are lying and who maybe don't have an innovative or disruptive business and maybe just want to come to Canada. The other includes some of the designated entities that are using their relationship and privilege with the IRCC to facilitate such bad actors by embellishing their business plans and by issuing letters of support, which basically means nomination, to individuals who don't deserve them and who don't have the right skills, the right money or the right supports in place to be able to make a successful business in Canada.

Those are some of the things that could be done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Mr. Khurana, but the time is up for Mr. Ali.

We will now proceed to Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe.

Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe, you will have six minutes.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I would like to start by thanking the witnesses here with us today who have taken the time in order to have their say on this extremely important study. We hope that the study will change the opinion of many persons who are seeking to obtain a visa, whether temporary or permanent.

Mr. Allos, you indicated that it is not easy to deal with IRCC.

In all the studies that our committee has undertaken in recent times, we have been hearing that there is a huge lack of transparency when dealing with IRCC. We are hearing a lot about IRCC, whether it is the fact that the department stopped giving an indication of processing times to applicants during the pandemic or the lack of transparency of the Chinook system, which is used to streamline file processing.

Do you think there's a lack of transparency?

If that is indeed the case, what would be the solution if we wished to change things?

[Rabea Allos]

I agree that there is no transparency. A lot of data that the IRCC is sitting on could be used to optimize the system and make it more efficient and increase the efficiency of the process. I believe a parliamentary immigration officer similar to the budget office in Parliament should be set up. It could be an independent body to oversee IRCC, have full access to their numbers, be able to mine their data, ask questions and get answers.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Allos.

Mr. Thorne, in the wake of various international crises, we have accepted refugees on an emergency basis. Obviously, I am thinking of Afghanistan, but there is also the current situation in Ukraine and the aftermath of the earthquakes in Haiti.

Do you think a possible solution would be to have an emergency mechanism within IRCC that would be used when there is an international crisis, whether it be a natural catastrophe or an armed conflict, so that we can quickly take in people in times of crisis?

Do you think that Canada has learned any lessons from past experience?

[Oliver Thorne]

Yes, that makes a great deal of sense to me. I have to give these comments with a caveat that my interaction with the immigration process has been solely with a focus on the Afghan special immigration measures program. My experience with immigration policy and processes as a whole is somewhat limited.

I can say that the immigration process for applicants in the special immigration measures program has been very slow, very challenging at times, uncertain and confusing. I believe that this is a direct result of the fact that the government was not prepared for the collapse of the Afghan government and the resulting humanitarian crisis.

It seems to me that having a task force for a team that is dedicated to responding to such emergencies would be to the benefit of IRCC, first and foremost, because they seem to have happened with relative consistency over the years. If we look at Syria, Afghanistan and now Ukraine, it seems from hearing the comments from other witnesses that those crises directly impacted the wait times and the viability of the applicants that they were supporting.

It seems to me that a dedicated team that can be spun up to react to such crises would be a big benefit to IRCC.