Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good afternoon. First of all, we want to say thank you to the chair and the committee members for allowing the Canadian Council for Refugees to present our position on clauses 172 and 173 of Bill C-43. I am not going to read the whole submission, because it will take longer than

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I just want to suggest to the committee to review the amendments and consider that you are reducing and taking away services to future Canadians. They will come to this country and they will give enrichment to this country.

Finance committee  Thank you for the invitation. We have 180 organizations in the Canadian Council for Refugees. Among them we have private sponsorship groups, settlement agencies, community groups, and lawyers who work with immigrants and refugees. Thank you for this invitation because we want

Status of Women committee  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 in

Status of Women committee  Right now it's taking 26 months to receive permanent residence from the spousal sponsorship. In the majority of cases either the person has a visitor's visa or is without status. In that case, when they go through the process with the emotional strength they put in the relationsh

Status of Women committee  One of the things is that the policy shouldn't be done on the basis of looking at it as if it will be a fraud. If you see, even in the percentage of the reports.... At IRCC, we have been asking for the statistics. In the majority of the reports of fraud, when they send a letter

Status of Women committee  I don't have statistics about that, but one of the elements that we can see with cyber-violence is more from a human trafficking perspective. On campus, one of the elements that we can talk about with international students is that it is one of the challenges that they can face.

Status of Women committee  In 2002, there was a whole gender-based analysis unit, with communication with the NGOs such as CCR, and also with organizations that work with women. That's when we presented. If you remember the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, there was a paper that did a gender-based a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting us to come and talk about the modernization of services. As you know, the Canadian Council for Refugees is a national organization that accommodates more than 180 member organizations serving immigrants and refugees. We are very concerned

Citizenship and Immigration committee  One of the things I believe is that if you go online to the website, one of the positive things is that the accessibility is faster, but all the websites have been arranged as though the person is going to be represented by someone, either by a lawyer or by a consultant. Many of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  First of all, it would be simpler in the call centre to press “1” for citizenship, “2” for immigration. When you want to have the status or the change of address, for example, if you are going to make the change of address you can do it online, but refugee claimants cannot. I be

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. It's still happening. I think that one of the problems that we see is that even though there is a system, it looks as if there is not clear communication in the call centre, because when you or even the clients make these phone calls, sometimes they say “There is nothing we

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Could you repeat the question? I have problems with the volume.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If that is going to happen, and if the government is going to do it, they need to consider the diversity of the categories and the vulnerabilities of the categories. For example, if the application is online, a simple change of address for a refugee claimant could be done in diff

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Can I intervene? At this moment right now, refugee claimants or people who are going to do an application online have to build their own account. These are called “My Account”. They use the UCI, the unique client identifier, and that is the client ID. You can use that as a call,