Citizenship and Immigration committee  I agree with my colleague. From what I've seen when I've looked at work that consultants have done—on appeal, for example—it tends to reinforce the horror stories, as you say. The problem is that consultants are limited in what they can do. They can put forward an application

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't necessarily disagree with that statement. I think there's a wide variety of representation that can be found. The problem, I think, is fundamental to the practice. A lot of these people are new to Canada. They don't necessarily know how to find lawyers. They rely on membe

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would agree with that statement. My understanding is that whenever anyone has gone to challenge this provision in court, the government has always settled. The DOJ has always settled. The presumption in the immigration bar is that they don't want a precedent. The government do

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. I had an almost identical case to the one you mentioned. The simplest thing to do would be to allow that individual—that child who has been accepted as a protected person—when they're applying for permanent residence, to include their parent on that application, where

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, initially, immediately after their arrival.... I'm talking about people who make their own way to Canada and then make a refugee claim. That's whom I see through my practice. I do not see resettled refugees. There's basically nothing for us lawyers to do once Canada has giv

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Everything I'm saying is anecdotal and from my practice. Assign what weight you will to that, but—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can provide you with examples, if that's what you'd like.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For example, I might see an individual who's escaping present-day Turkey because of their political opinion and opposition activity to the government. They tend to speak English reasonably well. They're educated people who've been able to get either a Canadian or a U.S. visa to c

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to participate here today. I'll begin by telling you a bit about the perspective I'm going to make my statements from. I'm a sole practitioner immigration lawyer in Toronto. I largely do refugee work, though I also do some work with econ

Citizenship and Immigration committee  All right. The point I was going to make was that apart from the refugees Canada resettles from UNHCR camps abroad, such as the Syrians we hear so much about, there are voluntary or what we can call “self-selecting” refugees who make it to our border, either through the United S