Public Accounts Committee on June 5th, 2018

[Heather Jeffrey]

Consular services apply to Canadian citizens, so permanent residents are not recipients of the same kinds of services. However, in cases of crises, emergency, or where there are humanitarian considerations under way, we do our utmost to help.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

A permanent resident constituent of mine, a Dutch citizen, when he went to the mission at The Hague, was turned away at the gate. His problem was that he had forgotten to take his permanent residency card and he couldn't come back. When he went to the mission there, the guards at the gate did not allow him to go forward. Is that normal?

[Heather Jeffrey]

Consular services are provided to Canadian citizens, not to PRs. I would have to look into what the process would be for a permanent resident who needed to access documentation. It is a separate process, one that is treated in a different way.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

I think if we could expand that, put on the website what a permanent resident can do in case they lose their document, it would be quite good.

Mr. Shugart, you mentioned that 2.8 million Canadians currently live outside Canada. Where do you find the biggest concentration? That is close to 8% of our population, which is very huge. In which parts of the world do you think these numbers are concentrated?

[Ian Shugart]

The United States would be the single largest. Sometimes that living is short term and sometimes it's long term, but I don't know.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Okay, let me cut to the chase. We can understand the Canadians who have worked all their lives here, who have paid their taxes, and who retire in the United States or the Caribbean. We can understand that. The people who go abroad to work or study or who want to retire abroad, that we can also understand. But what is the number of those Canadians who are “Canadians of convenience”, who came here, took citizenship, got their passport, and went back to whichever place they came from? How many do you think are included in this 2.8 million?

[Ian Shugart]

I could not estimate that off the top of my head.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Would you have a guesstimate?

[Ian Shugart]

No, I don't want to guess. I think that's a serious question. We also have to be careful, from a statistical point of view, on the definition. Citizenship is granted through a serious process. I wouldn't be qualified to make a distinction between those who are citizens for one set of reasons and those who are citizens for another. A more refined understanding of that—

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Let me put it this way. When you have a plan, let's say in a place like Florida where a lot of citizens spend their winter months, and you can expect the kinds of services they require, the workload there, you'll staff positions appropriately. I think you'll do the same thing with other southern countries where people go to vacation, but are there countries where, in your plan, you have to staff depending on the number of Canadians living there, whether they are there temporarily or for the long term?

[Ian Shugart]

We would take the circumstances and past volumes into account to predict what current and future volumes would be. A number of factors would go into that.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

There has to be a source for this 2.8 million number. What kind of source was it? Where can we find more in-depth data on this?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Arya.

You can finish your answer.

[Ian Shugart]

We can follow up with some further detail on that and give you what we know by way of a breakdown into categories, but to us, a citizen is a citizen. We will give them the service they require.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

For any questions today that you are going to look into a little more, I would encourage you to email or write back to our clerk so that we'll be certain to get that information before we go into our study.

Mr. Garrison, please.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to return to the question of service standards for Canadians who are arrested or detained abroad.

I think for those who might be listening in, and for the record, it's important to note that a lot of times these are not tourists. These are people who have business in those countries, or they're visiting families. From my own experience as an MP, I've had more problems among business people and people visiting their families than among tourists, even though we do have the occasional drunk driver in Hawaii who gets detained. I think it's important to remember that sometimes people don't have a choice about travel, either for business reasons or for family reasons. They need to travel and they need consular services as a result.

When we say that people are usually not visited in person, if you are looking at revising the service standard, might there not be a case for saying that...? Maybe the most diplomatic way is for the default to be that we attempt to see people in person, unless the country is on a list where we haven't had problems. I know you would want to create a list of countries that cause problems.

It's a concern to me, given my own experience of how those in charge of people in custody can manipulate the situation so that those people cannot communicate with you or cannot communicate their real situation through an email or even a phone call. It's very difficult.

Would we give consideration to having a different service standard, based on the risk of detention in those countries? Again, I would suggest we do it by rewarding the good rather than labelling the bad.

[Heather Jeffrey]

The current standards for visiting Canadians in detention vary according to region. For example in the United States, which has a particular set of prison standards, the standard is 12 months, whereas in another region we would visit every three months. We have three-, six-, and 12-month service standards, according to the region.

One of the things the Auditor General found in his report was that there was a variation in service standards and insufficient documentation provided about why that variation existed. We would agree that it's very important to document the reasons, but there are also good reasons to have variation in standards.

There are cases where individuals are very vulnerable because of the nature of their offence, because of the persons they are, whom they know, and where they are being detained. As a result, they need much more intensive consular intervention than someone in a prison system where rule of law is entrenched and where we are confident that rule of law will be respected in their treatment.

Yes, we do have that, and that would be part of their view of the service standards, to make sure we are taking into account areas where Canadians might find themselves in greater difficulty.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Is that for follow-up visits?

[Heather Jeffrey]

Yes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

It's not for the initial contact.

[Heather Jeffrey]

No. I think it is important to have that initial contact so we understand the full range of circumstances. It's often not possible to know that from a paper file. It is important to have a conversation with that individual to hear what their experience has been.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

The default is that we would attempt to have personal contact with all of those people, because we're not doing that.

[Heather Jeffrey]

In some cases, where you're confident that you can have a telephone conversation and that standards will be respected to allow that person to have a frank discussion with you, then I think we could look at that. That is certainly the practice, for example, in a place like the United States, where we have large numbers of these meetings.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

That's the suggestion I was making.

[Heather Jeffrey]

That is already the practice, but we would look at making sure that our service standards outline that clearly, so that Canadians have expectations about what service they can expect.