Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Michèle alluded to this earlier. We don't have a single layer of defence. I spent much of my career in aviation safety, were we have multiple layers of defence that stop accidents from happening. We have the same approach in the immigration system. It starts with the applicant and the applicant's having to vouch for the fact that they're responsible for this application and that their documents are true and genuine.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I wouldn't want to limit it to the border, with all due respect, because we don't want a single point of failure. What we have are border services officers who are trained to assess individuals and look for fraud in all sorts of domains as well as being given training to identify fraudulent documents.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would suggest again that's another one of those letters of defence that I talked about. We are always actively conducting two types of investigations—criminal investigations against the act itself, as well as administrative investigations. That is fundamental to ensuring the integrity of the system.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Over the last five years we have done over 800 investigations into IRPA offences, and that has led to over 1,000 charges. Mr. Mishra is just one example of that, but I'm not going to comment on specific cases, because we don't want to compromise those cases, and we have to let them play out.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As previously alluded to, this is a new process with a task force reviewing these individuals. As a matter of policy, under normal circumstances, with people who are in similar situations, we take their passports so that we're in a position to remove them if we have to do so down the road.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would just add that for those individuals, we've made it very clear that we will not be.... In part because they haven't been to the IRB yet, we will work to schedule them. In some instances we do our own review: We make a decision that there's not enough evidence and it won't go to the IRB.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I apologize, but I'm not familiar with this particular case. If you provide us details, I'd be more than happy to follow up to understand it. It may not even be part of our universe of students, part of the 285 we've been looking at. There are thousands of cases we're dealing with at any given time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd simply like to add that some students who began their studies in, let's say Alberta, may afterwards decide to continue in Quebec. It's therefore not only a matter of students registered in a specific province, but across the country. Our discussions are intended to shed light on their educational history.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  From my side of things, I can say that every time an officer has dealt with a student who had been defrauded, it was done compassionately and sensitively.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have nothing to add. We are in constant collaboration.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would just echo that it is a very collaborative and strong working relationship. There are any number of reasons why it takes a while for security screening to get done. Those security screening results are a recommendation that feeds into a broader decision. To Michèle's point, we work very closely, on a very regular basis, in addressing backlogs and delays.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  To date, we've identified 40 individuals who were deemed to be “non-genuine”, with 17 of them in the country. As we discussed previously, we are giving them an opportunity. We're going to follow up with those 17. If there's information we've missed or weren't aware of, we will seek that information from them.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would just echo that with regard to the multi-stage approach, we contributed to it at the port of entry where our officials do review documents and are trained to detect fraud. We have documents specialists who can support them. As well, there is the work we do in inland enforcement, either through administrative reviews, which led to this particular investigation, as well as criminal investigations that resulted, for example, in the spring of this year in charges against an individual involved in this fraudulent behaviour.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, we thought that we'd just have a joint opening statement and give the maximum time for questions.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I'll start. By way of the process, the committee has looked at each of these individual students. I think we've provided an update. Sixty-three so far have been deemed to be genuine, and 40 not to be genuine. For those who are deemed to be non-genuine, CBSA is doing a follow-up and reaching out to them.