Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.
As a lawyer specializing in immigration law for more than 25 years, processing delays have been a thorn in my side for virtually my entire adult life, but I have never seen the situation this bad.
The impacts of delay that I have seen personally in my own practice over the last few years have been heartbreaking—marriages breaking down, two-year-old children who have never met their fathers, clients having mental breakdowns and experiencing financial ruin.
I’d like to focus today on identifying two causes and two solutions. To put it in a nutshell, my view is that two of the biggest causes of processing delays and application backlogs are, number one, outdated and ineffective IT systems and, number two, a culture of secrecy.
Decades of lack of investment into IT infrastructure by governments of both political stripes left IRCC very flat-footed when the pandemic hit. With all the technology available to us tody, there simply was no effective emergency plan put in place to deal with the work-from-home situation, no effective plan put in place for how to interview applicants remotely.
To its credit, IRCC is now pushing toward online processing, which is very laudable. However, it seems that every new online system is full of glitches, to the point where we lawyers are actively resisting the move to mandatory online processing because, frankly, it is nothing short of a dumpster fire. It is characterized by disappearing data and almost daily system-wide crashes. We can surely do better.
IRCC's culture of secrecy is another major factor. My colleague Kareem El-Assal testified about this before you recently, and I can only say that I agree with him in his comments on the lack of transparency.
Let me show you how secrecy breeds delay though a very typical example that happens in my office every day. A file has exceeded its processing times, and we don’t know why. Government instructions tell us to send a web form inquiry. We do it, but either it doesn’t get answered at all, or we get a nonsense response that tells us nothing, usually more than four weeks later, which is way too late to be useful. Then that forces us to go and bother the good folks at the case management branch. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Then we have to bother you, members of Parliament, which, again, sometimes helps and sometimes doesn't. Then we're forced to bother the Access to Information Office. That takes months, which doesn’t really help us. As a last resort, we're then forced to go to the Federal Court and bother the Federal Court and the Department of Justice through litigation.
You can quickly see how this goes exponential very fast, and it ends up making a lot more work for everyone, including IRCC. It’s a waste of valuable resources at every level. If we could just get a clear reply the first time, we wouldn't have to do any of this.
My colleague Mario Bellissimo testified in front of this committee in May, and he proposed the idea of an ombudsperson. I certainly support that idea, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply communicate with one another clearly and on time so that we didn’t need one?
Even if all of these problems could be fixed overnight, what do we do with this massive backlog? Two things I think could give immediate relief.
First, switch all non-security-related interviews to video. It should be the default. That way, officers in any location in the world could conduct interviews without being limited by geography or logistics. If the refugee protection division can make life-and-death decisions on credibility assessments judged by video, surely we can manage administrative interviews in the same way.
Second, take all of the borderline cases and simply waive the interviews and push those cases through, in the interest of getting through a large volume of cases quickly. Yes, that will mean that a few people will get through the system who shouldn’t have, but frankly, at this point it is the cost of doing business because the damage that's being imposed by the backlog far outweighs any potential damage that could be caused by the odd person who gets erroneously approved.
In closing, I would also encourage a closer look at what did work. For example, humanitarian and compassionate processing actually improved during COVID. It's the only line of business I’m aware of that got faster instead of slower. I want to acknowledge them for doing an excellent job during very difficult times. What did they do differently? Looking at examples of success like that could yield some helpful clues for all of us.
