Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to all members of the committee for engaging on this important topic. My name is Martin Basiri. I came to Canada as an international student from Iran to study at the University of Waterloo for my master's in engineering. Six years ago, I co-fo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a great question. The way international student recruitment works, a lot of it is based on the way the universities and colleges, and to some extent some of the district boards, do advertisements and do their positioning. We've seen, not only in a city the size of Saskatoon

Citizenship and Immigration committee  SDS was the first step to create more transparency and the IRCC asking the students what they want. Absolutely, I think we should have a global SDS, but I would also design it per that country and the universities or colleges the students are coming to. For example, we know that

Citizenship and Immigration committee  From what I read about the case, we don't have that much information about the Chinook system. It seems like it's an Excel file and I don't think it's a real AI. AI can be extremely useful. For something like a student visa, it must be a very good AI. It can be transparent. I don

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The relationship between the students, the universities and IRCC is like a triangle. All of the material should be somehow shared between them, so what the students share with the university is the same story they are sharing for a visa and vice versa. When the university shares

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Madam Chair, do I have time to respond?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I studied the last six years of visas. I did this from 2016 to 2018 and 2019 to 2021. It showed that the francophone Africa visa rate went from 29.5% to 26.6% during this time, after the IRCC adopted this, and the rest of Africa went from 26% to 25%. Francophone countries during

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, there are some schools that didn't refund students, and their claim was that students came for education, not to come to Canada, and they did not refund. That being said, there were many schools that were accommodating, as Mr. Champagne talked about, and they did refund. W

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It was also mentioned that the entire.... For example, in Africa, the visa rate is only 25% on average. It's not that we need to know why for questioning. We need to know what a student should do so the visa rate gets closer to 50% or 60%, which is closer to the rest of the world

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Whoever came up with the idea of SDS was a genius and I thank them. They definitely helped those countries where SDS was implemented. That was a very good start. We need to make it better for everywhere to have a more dynamic SDS, rather than just certain states. The only countr

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For example, for all intents and purposes, it has been an issue for years. Once and for all, we all have to shake hands, hug each other, and finish this. It just requires—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Not that much, but almost with a majority of—

Science and Research committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, committee members, for engaging on this important matter. It's very encouraging to see everyone talking about talent, how to attract the best talent and retain and develop it. My name is Martin Basiri. I came to Canada from Iran in 2010 to stu

Science and Research committee  Thank you.

Science and Research committee  Yes, absolutely. I tried to cover it very fast so there would be time for others as well. The second recommendation I wanted to cover is on procurement, as that is very important. If you ask all the CEOs, the majority of them will tell you that a dollar of revenue is far better