Thank you, Mr. Chair.
To respect the time allocated to us, we have chosen to present five recommendations and to share with you two small pitfalls to avoid in the work you have been mandated to do, always with the objective of increasing the success rates of francophone immigrant applications in Canada.
The first recommendation is to strengthen the role of authorized representatives with francophone populations of Africa and Francophonie. The goal is very simple: we must prevent these people's money to be taken by charlatans who are not helpful and, even worse, sometimes cause the first application to be denied. I will make suggestions in this regard in a moment.
The second recommendation is to allocate additional resources to embassies responsible for the large francophone and francophile populations. Once again, I am not reinventing the wheel by telling you this. Just on Monday, I compared the work permit applications for the five largest anglophone populations to the seven largest francophone populations. The processing times for applications from the French-speaking populations are double those from the English-speaking populations. This is something that can be easily acted upon.
The third recommendation is to allow officials to gather additional information when an application that is overall solid contains insufficient details. This was a common practice in the past but it unfortunately tends to fade or even disappear. The file may be very solid, but it may be missing something like a comma or it needs clarification, or another version of a document may be required. This now leads to a denial, whereas the official reviewing the application could simply send a letter requesting clarification, in order to do a more specific analysis and make a decision based on the application.
The fourth recommendation is to provide more descriptive and detailed reasons for denial. People who choose Canada will not give up after their application has been rejected a first time. If the reasons they are given for the denial are so nebulous that they do not know at all the reasons for the decision, they will make a second and a third application, which will be rejected again. In addition, you will see that artificial intelligence will cause problems.
This brings me to the fifth recommendation. We must work to minimize the biases introduced by the use of artificial intelligence in the processing of applications. Canada’s attractiveness means that we will keep receiving more applications, and we will not be able to handle that influx without artificial intelligence. Given the origin of francophone immigrants, we must work to minimize the biases introduced by artificial intelligence. A person can understandably be rejected a couple of times, but some applicants risk being excluded for life if we rely only on robots. We therefore believe that artificial intelligence tools should be tuned to better reflect this reality. After all, the fact that a case is handled by artificial intelligence should not result in a less fair decision.
In closing, I would like to make two suggestions to avoid certain pitfalls.
First, temporary immigration should not be excluded from your thoughts and recommendations. Unfortunately, this was a mistake made in Quebec, which greatly delayed the debate and made it purely semantic. Our programs allow immigrants to go through temporary status to get to permanent status. Please include temporary immigration in your thoughts and recommendations.
Before I answer your questions, I would like to say one last thing.
Bilingualism needs are not directly proportional to the number of applications in French sent to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. At BB Immigration, we are no better than others. The majority of practitioners have to do the same. When we see that it will be easier and more efficient to process the request in English,
we're just going to switch to English and do it in English for the benefit of our clients.
The need for departmental and consular bilingual services should not simply be determined by the number of applications in French
I hope I managed to stay within my allotted time. I am now ready to answer your questions.