Citizenship and Immigration committee  Applications are sent back for very, very minor deficiencies, something like you missed a box or your photograph was the wrong size, things that could easily be rectified. My recommendation would be to send an email or call the applicant and tell them to replace it, instead of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Section 25 gives officers the very broad discretion and ability to waive any requirement of the act or regulation. So to the extent that certain service delivery factors are regulated—they're actually mentioned in the regulations—then I suppose section 25 could be used, but I thi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have a couple of comments about that. First of all, in terms of use of technology, I think there are a lot of functions within IRCC that could be automated to allow for a greater client touch without necessarily generating more work for people by having to send handwritten ema

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I was going to say get rid of the requirement that the parents have to prove that they're going to go back to their home country within a certain period of time. That's very limiting, especially for widows.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If you're a permanent resident, the rule is that within every five-year time frame, you have to spend 730 days physically in Canada, with some exceptions. The problem is that when people run up against a situation of aging or ill parents, they end up having to spend protracted pe

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm going to make myself unpopular at this table and say that I'm actually not in favour of reducing the income level for sponsorship. That would probably be the bottom of my list, personally. What would be number one? I would say maybe dealing with the definition of “dependent c

Citizenship and Immigration committee  My recommendation would be common sense. If a document is missing, pick up the phone and call the person. Tell them to send it, and give them a deadline, instead of strapping snail mail to the back of a donkey and sending it overland, which is the current system.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's an interesting idea and there's no reason why that couldn't work. I do think it might become unwieldy at a certain point or a little unmanageable to apply multiple different income tests or settlement funds tests to different ages of parents. I think also it makes assumpti

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I 100% agree with you that it could have a demographic effect. Certainly, with my client base, I know a lot of clients who hold back on having children because they don't have enough family support to take care of them.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Now, this is not something that happens every day, but it does happen at least a few times a year. If you check media reports, you'll find these stories tend to hit the media, because they involve separation of parents and children. I recommend that this be changed.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and honourable committee members. I've met some of you before, but not all. My name is Chantal Desloges. I'm an immigration and refugee lawyer based in Toronto. I've been working with immigrants and refugees for 22 years, 18 of those as a lawyer. I'm

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Source country is one possibility. Use of agency discretion is another possibility, which would not require a legislative change.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think there are two separate issues here. There is prioritization of refugee referrals from UNHCR, and also how you deal with people who don't meet those criteria. I think that all it would take in terms of resettlement is to let the UNHCR know that we want to add, or take aw

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I agree with Mr. Dyck. We can't help everyone. So at some point, we have to set parameters. We have to prioritize. In fact, we're already prioritizing. If you look at Mr. Casasola's testimony yesterday, he talked about how the UNHCR selects which priorities they're going to desig

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm a big fan of the private sponsorship of refugees program and less so of government-assisted refugees, although I do think that government-assisted refugees do have their place in our program. If it were up to me, I would much more heavily weight the balance toward private sp