Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for inviting me.
My name is Omer Khayyam. I'm an immigration lawyer in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I'd like to share some thoughts on the growing immigration backlog and possible recommendations.
Immigration delays have direct consequences on all areas of life for temporary residents. I'm going to give some examples of clients' experiences in the past week or two.
I have a client right now who can't travel to his ailing father because IRCC has delayed issuing his COPR, his certificate of permanent residence, from the PR confirmation portal. He has had to delay because he can't get his PR card to travel and return.
I have another client whose initial Federal Court filing took a long time to even get approved because of backlogs that are now occurring at the Federal Court.
Health cards cannot be renewed when work permits are delayed. Others struggle even to get their first health card. I had a client who was very sick, and she failed repeatedly in getting a health card renewed. In the case of another family I had, the parents had to remove their children from public school because the parents simply couldn't get their work permits approved in time.
I have some clients who delay weddings in order to meet express entry scores, others who delay business start-ups until they become permanent residents and others who want to purchase a home in an expensive Canadian market, but they don't have their status. Some of them may go ahead and purchase it; some of them will delay it. Ultimately, they'll end up paying more.
It's a dehumanizing situation. People become file numbers and category types. In the media we see something else: self-congratulation and smiles. My clients get a progress bar, and they will repeatedly ask me what percentage it is at, but they quickly learn that it is a misleading and fictitious creation by IRCC to keep them placated.
Immigration should be about new beginnings, new relationships and fostering trust. The first lesson an immigrant learns is not to trust the Canadian government. As lawyers, our caseloads have grown with the backlog. Clients are more frustrated than ever. While programs such as the TR to PR pathway approve permanent residents in three months, programs like the caregiver program can take three to four years, so people don't know what to expect. Predictability is being eroded, so how can there be any certainty?
I want to bring home those three points: certainty, predictability and consistency, because these are crucial to the rule of law, and that applies to immigration. It's not just a government program; it's part of the legal system in Canada.
My suggestions are to approach this 2.7-million backlog problem differently. I don't think you can get out of this problem with the same thinking that got you into it. Some suggestions may be more drastic, but I'm offering some food for thought.
Our criminal justice system sees two million arrests a year. We can maybe learn a thing or two from this area of law. When I worked in legal aid, I noticed that when they could not handle the caseloads, they would outsource to the private bar to have lawyers deal with certain cases. Maybe in immigration we can outsource some work to lawyers to handle the parts of the visa processing on the front end that are not crucial to the decision and at least lighten the load for the visa officers who will ultimately be making the final decision.
Some provincial courts have weekend programs whereby a judge, a prosecutor and a private bar lawyer will come in on the weekend to lessen the load for the coming week. Can the backlog be solved on a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday schedule? I think IRCC should use the resources they have and offer incentives to experienced officers to work longer hours and into the weekend at times.
There have been some suggestions about ramming people through and approving a number of people en masse. I think a controlled lottery of approving low-risk applicants, maybe 1% to 2%, may solve the problem in the short term, but it would put strain on other areas. I can maybe discuss a little bit more about that later, but I think you need to consider the unintended consequences that can happen when we take some of these unpredictable measures.
I don't have concrete solutions; I can only suggest that the existing problems be looked at differently.
There's one thing I was looking at, but I don't know how much time I have to get into this.