Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd like to add one thing. I appreciate where your question is coming from, but I'm not sure it's the right question. I don't think it's necessarily about crafting the right sentence, although certainly penalties are important. I think it's about creating a regulatory scheme that has credible enforcement lodged in it.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm happy to begin to address that. I think my colleagues probably have something to say about it as well. What really makes me happy, hearing your question, is that ultimately we're talking about the details. Everybody here seems to agree that we need a statute, and whether that statute is federal or provincial, okay, we'll figure that out.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Does that answer your question?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely not. They don't have a statute that empowers them to do any of those things, and that's the problem.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't perceive there to be a conflict of interest. That's our position. One of the models we're looking at is a federal statute that could contain a clause for a provincial opt-out, in a sense. In provinces such as Ontario, where paralegals are already regulated by the law society, discipline and enforcement could be handled by the law society, which has centuries of experience and a proven track record.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There absolutely can, and those rules are enforceable. There are fines. All sorts of sanctions are available. If a fine is levied by the law society against a member, or even against a non-member--because again, the law society regulates the area of practice--the law society can go after someone who's not a member, someone who's hanging out a shingle and representing himself as a lawyer or taking money from someone for that reason.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm going to try to address a couple of your points in order, the first point being that the federal government may or may not have competence to draft the kinds of statutes that are necessary for this. I don't want to sell Parliament short. I think the federal Parliament could certainly learn from the patterns of regulation that exist in all the provinces.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm sure the other witnesses, too, have opinions about that. I think where I would start is that because immigration is so clearly under federal jurisdiction—there are immigration statutes within the provinces as well, but who gets to come to Canada is under federal jurisdiction—the Supreme Court said, in the Mangat case, that regulating that is certainly within the federal jurisdiction should the feds decide to do so.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's not a coincidence that the law society, which has a fairly good--in fact, excellent--reputation for discipline and enforcement, has an empowering statute. The difference between the actual codes of conduct and the disciplinary policy between, for example, the Law Society of Upper Canada and CSIC isn't all that great.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Surely, and I'm not affiliated with the law society, so I feel a bit diffident about speaking about their experiences or expertise. Certainly in Ontario and every province, the law societies are the regulators, and they do a good job across the country. They do have--I think you said it was 1797--more than two centuries of experience doing this, and that certainly is something a regulator like CSIC could learn from.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd be happy to answer your question, but if you wanted to let her go, I'll wait for that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I want to make sure I understand your question.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Hilary Evans Cameron and I are here representing Downtown Legal Services, a clinic associated with the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law. We're delighted to see the committee turn its attention to the regulation of immigration consultants, because we see many clients in the clinic's immigration and refugee division, some of whom have come to us after dealing with immigration consultants.