Public Accounts Committee on Feb. 24th, 2009

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Please give a brief response.

[Stephen Rigby]

Certainly, Mr. Chair.

For the most part, it is our belief that situations where you have ten people in a cell for three are an extreme exception. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but we don't believe it happens frequently.

We have a couple of other things. Number one, we have a new national policy in terms of what the managers of these holding centres are to do when they exceed capacity. Number two, we are working more acutely with all of the provinces to get arrangements in place so that we can transfer high-risk individuals into their holding centres, which will reduce the stress on ours. Finally, we do work with the Red Cross and we do work with the stakeholders in the refugee community to make sure the standards that we are adopting are consistent with their expectations.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Just before we go to Mr. Christopherson, I encourage all members of the committee to keep your questions short and precise and to the point, and the witness to keep the answers again short, brief, and relevant to the question.

Mr. Christopherson, you have seven minutes.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you all for attending today.

I'd like to follow up on the Bloc question. I heard you say you made a priority of those whose whereabouts you don't know and who have a criminality in their background, but you said 16% to 17% of those who are removed fit this category. This didn't seem to me to be much of a priority list, 16% to 17%.

[Stephen Rigby]

There are a couple of things, Mr. Christopherson. First, we use the resources that we have to target the higher-risk cases. Wherever we can locate somebody, using probably a disproportionate number of the resources on those cases, we remove them. We've been able to keep that level at about 16% to 17%. We hope to actually raise that level.

At the same time, though, we have to keep in mind that we need to keep a reasonable amount of our resource effort on the normal immigration stream. The immigration community is very sensitive internationally to any signals that a country such as Canada might be doing less to remove normal low-risk, non-criminal individuals if they are not admissible to that country. What I think you would see is a consequent impact on the number of people who would be coming to Canada and attempting to utilize and possibly exploit the refugee system.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm still having some trouble understanding.

I'd also like you to address why the number is growing. Again, things that certainly get my attention are when we have previous audits and problems are found, and we do another audit and the problem is not solved. That, to me, is the most egregious type of unacceptable conduct, and these numbers are going up. So you're not even getting a lid on it, let alone making any gains.

Then you say those with criminal backgrounds are your priority. You said it again: 16% to 17%. I would have thought the answer would be that something like 80% of the people you do reach would be on this priority list, but it's 16% to 17%. That doesn't give me a lot of comfort.

Maybe you can address also the issue that the numbers are going up every year. Is it strictly resources? If you had enough money, would these people be gone?

[Stephen Rigby]

Let me address your point with regard to why the number is going up. The prime correlation between the number of warrants going up is the number of refugees making applications to Canada, and that number has gone up systematically over the last three years. It's gone from 22,000 to 28,000 cases in the most recent reporting period, to about 37,000.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Are the percentages coming down? I understand the numbers get bigger, but is the percentage coming down?

[Stephen Rigby]

The percentage of what?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

The percentage of people you lose track of.

[Stephen Rigby]

No, I think generally speaking the percentage of people we have to issue warrants against is in rough correlation with the growth in the number of people who are seeking access to the refugee system in Canada.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

So at best, you're still falling behind.

Where are you making some gains? Where are you making improvements? Where are the improvements?

[Stephen Rigby]

I think where we're making improvements is by having a better sense of what's in the total inventory and trying to have a more acute sense of where we're going to target the resources that we have, both in terms of people who are still in Canada and people who fall into the high-risk criminal demographic.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm sorry, but wouldn't that have been discovered in the 2003 audit? That doesn't sound to me like anything new. It sounds to me like something you would have thought of as a response to the first go-round, and now we're on the second go-round. My sense is, if we sit here and nothing changes, in another five years another committee is going to get another report and they're going to see the numbers still going up. So I'm asking what you're doing to change what you've been doing, since what you've been doing isn't working.

[Stephen Rigby]

Everything I've described to you over the last couple of minutes has been new things that we have begun doing over the last six or seven months, so I am hopeful that they are going to pay dividends and respond to some of the issues raised in the audit.

I take your point. This issue has been somewhat systematic since the 2003 audit. The first thing I'm doing before I look to the issue of whether resources are appropriate is to make sure that the resources I have are being spent properly. I think that's an obligation I have, and that's what I'm going to do right now and probably over the next 12 months.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

With regard to cash bonds, I noted on page 12 in the report that 368 of 2,038 cash bonds posted were forfeited. The agency located 178 individuals, of whom 146 were removed, but you don't know the whereabouts of the remaining 190 individuals who forfeited their cash bonds. I'm reading, “The Agency has identified 18 of the 190 individuals as having a history of criminality.”

What's the problem here? Is this discretionary decision-making that's not good? Does the policy need to be refined? The whole idea is that you're making a judgment, as I understand it, on these 2,000-plus people that they don't fit, but with certain conditions, we'll let them. Somebody has made a judgment that a cash deposit would do in this case, and then, with 368 individuals, it didn't. Some of these have criminal backgrounds, and now you can't find some of them. How are you addressing that?

[Stephen Rigby]

The first thing I would say is that when you refer to criminality, there's a--

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I didn't. I'm referring to the auditor's words.

[Stephen Rigby]

When one refers to criminality, there are a number of stratifications that can be made. The people that we would release on terms and conditions, including a bond, would be people who, according to the evidence and in our judgment, represent minor criminality for the most part and who we are reasonably confident would abide by the terms and conditions of the bond.

That is not always the case. I would agree with the Auditor General. The numbers they have cited are not entirely acceptable to me, so I think what we have to look at is whether or not the sorts of risk assessments we are doing on the sorts of people we are releasing on terms and conditions are appropriate. We are doing that.

Secondly, I think that as we get more fulsome arrangements in place with the provinces, that will give us a little bit more capacity to refer people, on an organized basis, into provincial facilities, which will relieve some of the tension on our immigration holding facilities in each of the regions.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'll be interested to see follow-ups on those kinds of numbers, because that will give us a sense of it.

But you made a nice segue for me, and I appreciate it: on the agreements with the provinces, there were two of them--

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thirty seconds, David.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thanks, Chair.

You're about to conclude agreements with Ontario and Quebec at the end of this year and the remaining ones by 2011. What takes so damn long?

[Stephen Rigby]

Not that I want to punt the question, but I'll ask my colleague, Ms. Johnston, to comment. She's been handling a lot of these discussions.

[Kimber Johnston, Vice-President, Enforcement Branch, Canada Border Services Agency]

Thank you.

I would just point out that the approach we've decided to take with the remaining provinces is to target the two provinces where we have the most capacity. Obviously, Ontario and Quebec are where we have the biggest crunch when it comes to detention capacity, so we wanted to conclude those agreements first.

We already have agreements with the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta.

With respect to the remaining provinces in the prairies and the Atlantic, if you look at our detention rates, they're actually very low in those provinces, so what we decided to do was target Ontario and Quebec first. Because the remaining provinces have low detention capacities versus the number of provinces, that's the way we decided to approach it.

We've targeted 2011, but we will certainly make every effort to conclude the agreements with those remaining provinces as soon as possible. We were just looking at targeting time.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

The priority wasn't my issue. It was that it takes so long to get an agreement. You made my case. The smaller provinces have fewer cases. Getting an agreement ought to be that much easier. I couldn't understand why it's taken years and years and years to get an agreement with provinces.

Thanks, Chair.