Evidence of meeting #36 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was desloges.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Just for clarity, are we going to continue the full hour? Is that the plan?
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Salma Zahid
Yes, we will begin this round of questioning. I will check with the clerk as to how long we have the facility available for. We will try to complete this one hour with the witnesses.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Thank you.
Ms. Desloges, you were just talking about the glitches and some of the frustrations that you were having. Was there anything else? You were cut off mid-sentence, so pick it up there and we can go from there.
5:05 p.m.
Senior Partner, Desloges Law Group, As an Individual
I was nearly finished, but I wanted to give you some examples of things that happen regularly.
You'll be prompted in one of the online forms to hit a button, and that button doesn't exist; applications that you've uploaded simply disappear; you're unable to log in to various portals for weeks, or in some cases even more than a month. To top it all off, lawyers are not allowed to access some of these portals, so if a client has a problem or runs into difficulty, they are not allowed to ask their own lawyer to help them, which is ridiculous.
There's no effective means of communication for troubleshooting issues. Sometimes you end up going on Twitter to try to find some help with the electronic problem that you're having.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Is there any mechanism for you to feed that back to the department of IRCC? If so, have they responded in any way?
5:05 p.m.
Senior Partner, Desloges Law Group, As an Individual
I do have some colleagues from various lawyers' organizations who do give feedback to IRCC. They keep asking for specific examples and we keep feeding that information back to them. However, it puts the burden on us to troubleshoot their system for them, and at the end of the day it doesn't seem like anything really changes.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
You should send them a bill.
You also mentioned a culture of secrecy regarding transparency. Could you explain a little bit more, maybe with some examples? Why do you say that? That's a fairly strong statement as well.
5:10 p.m.
Senior Partner, Desloges Law Group, As an Individual
It's virtually impossible to communicate with IRCC. If you use the telecentre, most of the time you can't get through. When you do get through, they tell you that they can't really say much; they're not very much help. If you use the web form, a lot of the time you won't get an answer at all, and if you do get an answer, frankly, it's gibberish and it doesn't make sense a lot of the time. When it does make sense, it's just a canned response.
There is no individual you can contact. They have put up a complete wall around all of their communication so that it impedes you from trying to get a hold of somebody who might know the answer or be able to help you with the problem that you're having.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
One of your suggestions was to just waive the interview on the borderline cases and push them through. What I noted here is that you said the damage from the backlog is far worse than the risk of bad admissions. Could you expand a little bit on that? What exactly do you mean when you say the damage from the backlog?
5:10 p.m.
Senior Partner, Desloges Law Group, As an Individual
I'm talking about things like people losing their jobs, people having to leave Canada because of the expiry of certain things because their application hasn't come through in time, people missing delivery of their child in Canada, or marriages breaking down.
I have a client who contacted me just a couple of days ago. She's on the verge of a mental breakdown. She fears that her marriage is in danger because it's been almost four years now that they have been waiting for the case to finalize and it hasn't been possible. To me, the human cost, and the cost to the reputation of Canada when we're trying our best to attract the top talent in the world, by far outweighs a minimum of people who might slip through the cracks and get approved when they shouldn't have been.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
What would be the negative if somebody slipped through the cracks? What are we talking about here?
5:10 p.m.
Senior Partner, Desloges Law Group, As an Individual
I would never suggest doing that if it was a security-related issue. I'm talking about, for example.... Sometimes an officer might have a question about somebody's job reference letter, an education diploma or maybe their English or their French is not quite at the standard that it should be, so they maybe earmarked that for an interview situation. Or maybe it's a marriage case and they're not 100% convinced about the genuineness of the marriage.
In those cases, they're not really sure and they don't have massive concerns, but at the same time they would normally interview them. I'm saying, if it's in the grey zone, give them the benefit of the doubt and just push it through.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
It's not like they are criminals or there are going to be any dire consequences of that.
5:10 p.m.
Senior Partner, Desloges Law Group, As an Individual
No. I would 100% never recommend doing it in that case.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
I'll thank the witness for her great answers.
Mr. Maguire has something really quickly.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Larry Maguire Conservative Brandon—Souris, MB
Yes. It's not a question.
I'm wondering if Mr. Ballard, because of time constraints.... You mentioned your rural model. I wonder if you could table that rural model with the committee.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Salma Zahid
The time is up. We will now proceed to Mr. El-Khoury.
You have six minutes for your round of questioning. Please begin.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Fayçal El-Khoury Liberal Laval—Les Îles, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'd like to welcome the witnesses, and thank them for being here to share their ideas on how to advance and improve our immigration system.
Mr. Ballard, you do incredible humanitarian work. I'd like to know what the biggest challenges are for the people you work with, as far as processing times are concerned. Does it impact the programs you administer? What measures would you recommend?
5:10 p.m.
Vice-Chairperson, Syria-Antigonish Families Embrace
The problems with the backlogs.... We sometimes see a bunching up of families. We have no indication of when the families will arrive.
As I mentioned earlier, we are a humanitarian organization. The people we are attempting to support in coming to Canada are refugees. They're in terrible situations. One family spent 10 years in a camp in Jordan. Another one, who arrived just a couple of weeks ago, was almost on the street with four children. They were probably in processing for three or four years. We were very concerned that we were going to lose this family to the street without the ability to contact them—without the ability to have an address—so that they would be able to continue the process, which drags on and on. Once again, I think we saw a problem with communication.
From the perspective of the refugee process, it's a bit different. They arrive in Toronto. They receive their permanent residence status when they land, but before they come, the situation they're in, in countries where they are under oppressive situations, where people are physically and verbally attacked and abused.... They pull their children out of any schooling that they might have, because they're targeted as people who are not wanted in their country.
When we talk about the rural model that I mentioned earlier, this is something that we see would be applicable across the board in rural Canada, because we have these challenges. For instance, there's the bunching up of applications coming at the same time. If you have four families of six who come to Antigonish, a small community, we have a very difficult time managing that effectively to resettle these families so that they can start their life in Canada without a legislated world of poverty, relegated to minimum-wage jobs for the rest of their lives.
This is the kind of thing that we look at.