Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you to the committee for inviting me to speak today on these important issues, namely immigration application backlogs and processing times in Canada. My name is Laura Schemitsch and I'm an immigration and refugee lawyer with Race and Company LLP. In my practice, I primaril

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. I definitely believe that hiring new IRCC staff will help and should help with this backlog. However, I believe that advocates and applicants need to be updated on the status of that progress. It's one thing to promise to hire these employees. It's another thing to demonstr

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for your question. Again, I believe it's a question of transparency. The government is stating that it will address these backlogs through certain measures, but we see people who are submitting applications more recently than those who submitted applications at the pea

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely. I think it's very important that applicants are able to receive specific responses about their current applications. It is not enough to provide a status update tool or some other kind of generic tool. It is important that applicants are able to receive specific updat

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As someone who is a fairly new lawyer, my experience with Canada's immigration system has primarily been one of clients expressing their frustration and uncertainty with the system. In the past year, there has been a lot of advocacy from lawyers and other advocates asking for sol

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It depends on what industries you're talking about, or what those streams would be used for as solutions. For example, I do work in Whistler, Canada, where there is a heavy reliance on tourism. I agree with many of Ms. Potter's remarks that there are certain programs and/or pro

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I believe that those circumstances were very dire, so those measures came into place in order to facilitate helping people during a humanitarian crisis, as Canada has done in the past. I believe that I was also critical of the fact that those measures have not been extended to ot

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Can you please clarify your question?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  My understanding is that it does occur, and I believe that other colleagues of mine in the immigration bar have suggested that perhaps IRCC should have an emergency task force that is able to deal with those special circumstances that undoubtedly will arise in the future, while n