Sure, I'd be happy to comment on that.
As I said, I want to preface my remarks by saying that I don't want to disparage or demean the visa officers in any way. They have a very difficult job and they're doing it with very few resources, but I do think they could use some more training. I have to sympathize with them. I've been doing refugee law on a full-time basis, eating, sleeping, and breathing it for almost 14 years, and I'm still learning new things every day. It's a very complicated area of law. We have board members in Canada and that's their full-time job, just to do that every single day. So I do think that any amount of extra training that could go to the visa officers would definitely be helpful.
I think another problem we have is that a lot of the pre-decision work is done by locally engaged officers. These are people who work at the embassy, but they're not Canadians. This is the pre-screening of the application, the handling of the paperwork, sometimes even interviews, although not so much with refugee claims.
I strongly disagree with the practice of using locally engaged officers, particularly for sensitive cases such as this. You know the people who are working at the High Commission in Nairobi are African, and given what we know about homophobic tendencies in a lot of the African countries, for a gay man or a gay woman to go into the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi and deal with another African, handling their paperwork for the refugee claim, is at the least extremely unnerving, and also I fear that the biases of the person could creep in to the decision-making process.