Good afternoon.
My name is Loly Rico and I'm the president of the Canadian Council for Refugees. We are a national organization and we accommodate more than 180 members. We do most of our work as an advocacy group for the rights of immigrants and refugees.
Thank you for the invitation. Our focus today will be in relation to policies and practices on immigration. I want to bring up different points. One is on the conditional permanent resident status. We welcome that the government is going to remove it for next year, but one of the things we have been seeing is that in the meantime they are still implementing the regulation and on that, as you know, there are even reports saying it makes women and children more vulnerable.
We in the CCR are asking the government publicly to commit to stop pursuing this and to remove the condition, even though it is going to be finished next year. Maybe they can stop doing that.
The other issue we want to bring up is about the spousal sponsorship issue, which I want to focus on a little bit more, because the processing time in Canada is too long. Sometimes we have reports from our members that the women stay in abusive relationships because there are no other options for them to get out of abusive relationships without being deported.
We also want to bring up the human trafficking situation, especially focused on youth, on young women who are the victims of human trafficking, and especially in international cases. The government has a temporary protection form, the temporary resident permit, but there is no option for permanent residency. This limits them and puts them more in a situation of vulnerability to stay in the trafficking situation. We are looking for the government to have legislation where they can give more permanent residence.
I would like to deal with family reunification, for the long term. I want to bring up that when the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was implemented in 2002, there was a consideration of gender-based analysis in the policies and there was involvement of the community. In the past, the Canadian Council for Refugees has been in communication because even Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada had a gender-based analysis unit and started talking about different regulations. At this moment there is no unit and they lost that possibility and they stopped doing this analysis. I've given you the examples about spousal sponsorship and conditional permanent residence. We are recommending to the committee and to the government to go back and have a gender-based analysis unit in Immigration and to have a consultation with the community.
The other item that we want to bring up is about enforcement, which we are looking at with the Canada Border Services Agency. I can give you an example, a case where a woman is without status because she's in a spousal sponsorship and that's how the abuse starts. When the police is called, because the person doesn't have status, she is immediately reported to the Canada Border Services Agency. At the end sometimes there's no protection for the woman. She is deported.
We have been asking the Canada Border Services Agency to have a violence against women policy. We are looking for a possibility that you can bring into your study that there has to be a violence against women policy in relation to the Canada Border Services Agency and in relation to Immigration.
That's our position. Again, we thank you for the invitation.