Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm going to play devil's advocate here on the minimum necessary income because, again, we service low-income people. Many of them are immigrants, but not all. Still, they're certainly racialized. Basically, right now the minimum necessary income is the low-income cutoff plus 30%

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of interim measures, perhaps some sort of operational directive not to go after...to enforce this as hard would be helpful, but of course nothing will be a substitute for actually repealing it. In a lot of cases we see, the spouse, who most often is the husband, is real

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I appreciate that, Mr. Donnelly. I wanted to go over some of the situations that paragraph 117(9)(d) captures that we've seen on the ground at the clinic. I mentioned the one-child, and I guess now a two-child, policy in China where those are the family planning regulations, and

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are so many different ways in which, at the back end, they could potentially speed it up. I do think that, if regulation 4 is changed, obviously you wouldn't get rejected as much at the front end. Of course, if you're rejected by somewhat overly broad bans or barriers at th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Basically, this excludes from the family sponsorship anybody who was not examined at the time somebody landed as a permanent resident. We believe this catches many legitimate situations and is also overly broad and harsh, particularly for our clients having to do with

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Avvy. I'd like to focus my submission on three points. The first is with respect to conditional permanent residency. As expected, and as we see at the clinic, the mandatory imposition of a two-year permanent residency condition that a sponsored person live with thei

Human Resources committee  I'll quickly address that. Yes, I do think that the caps on permanent residency for those programs do contribute, because if this is the whole pie, let's say 5% can apply for PR, what happens to the 95%? They're stuck in temporary status limbo. These are all created by us as a s

Human Resources committee  I'm aware of some of the inspection deficiencies that have been brought forth on the record by previous witnesses. Obviously, that is a major concern—again, going back to first principles—because of the significant power imbalances between temporary foreign workers who do not hav

Human Resources committee  We're doing a lot of good things. I think we've identified the problem and we're trying to figure out what's the best model to address some of those problems. I would say that because of the particularly marginalized position that a lot of these migrant workers come to vis-à-vis

Human Resources committee  Of course, it depends on what sort of complaint it is. There are some occupational health and safety complaints, housing complaints, and employment standards. I do employment standards mostly, so I'm most familiar with those. I would say that the average case, at the fastest, ta

Human Resources committee  Yes, before some resolution happens.

Human Resources committee  What we're seeing now is that when a work permit is specifically tied to, let's say, a particular job at employer X—again, this is not the case with all employers—it creates a situation where the employer knows that whatever happens, if this person is no longer working at this jo

Human Resources committee  I think the tip line system is part of the tool box that we can use, but, of course, at the end of the day it is of little benefit for the actual migrant worker. Let's say if you're a migrant worker and you're being abused or your employer is not doing something right, you call t

Human Resources committee  I thank the chair and the committee members for giving me an opportunity to speak here with you today. My name is Vincent Wong. I'm a staff lawyer at the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. We're a not-for profit community legal clinic that serves low income,

Human Resources committee  Thanks for that.