Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have to confess it wasn't my intention to suggest that we add questioning of values and beliefs to the processing. What I was saying was that we check out people in various ways, but we don't ask them whether they're going to set aside their home values, their home country valu

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have to apologize again, because in my mind I've mixed two articles that I've written. I didn't realize you were talking about the one that ended with the honour killings question. I don't think that kind of probe is consistent with democratic values, and I think our democrac

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, the context of the article was that we were talking about Chinese signage and the adopting of Canadian values and things like that. What I said was that when we bring people to this country, we don't ask them those kinds of questions. But that doesn't mean we should be cultur

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that thought needs to be given to the enforcement versus facilitation equation. It's difficult for a visa officer, under the best of circumstances, to make judgments on a person's intentions. Visa officers are meant to be mind readers, and it's a very difficult task. So

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's nice to have a fan on the committee. What was it about?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would hesitate to give you a list of questions. We have established protocols. As an immigration control officer, I was concerned with the validity of the document and the legitimacy of the person's routing to Canada. Those were usually the two markers of someone who was tryi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Instances of security, terrorism, or people who wish Canada harm are sometimes associated with national profiles but are basically concerned with individuals. We have decided, through long and hard policy thought, to make visas necessary for some countries and to make other partn

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I've understood you, you've conflated a couple of things. Imposing a visa is a form of pre-screening. It works much in the way that visa applications in India and China work. The applications are given a cursory look-over, and the majority of them are refused. Putting a visi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm saying that in such countries as particularly India and China—perhaps our experience with Mexico is too young to make a final judgment of that—there is no actual screening of the individual. Decisions are made on the basis of profiling. So we're not adding any layer of secu

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, you're speaking to a former immigration control officer, as you know. They're now called “MIOs”, I think, migration integrity officers. They're stationed overseas at departure gates of flights for Canada. There they do actual screening, mostly in terms of the legitimacy of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There can be no other explanation for these kinds of rejections.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think what we're looking at is a question of this being efficient versus effective. The efficient system we have now is a fairly low-cost system, and it's efficient because there's no appeal. A visa officer can quickly check off the boxes for insufficient ties to home country,

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think it would absolutely help. The point I was trying to make was that the system we have in place now is unfair and not really worth pursuing, because it answers neither security questions nor any actual questions about the applicant. A procedurally fair and useful system wou

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can link procedural fairness with security and the question that Don asked just a minute ago. Procedural fairness requires that the criteria that an applicant must meet be made explicit and clear, and that the applicant have a chance to answer or refute any concerns the visa of