Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, if I can speak to that, we're sort of flailing here. The direct answer, of course, is that there's the Competition Act, and I don't think that legislating fees is the answer. I know that the Liberal government in particular talked a lot about making evidence-based decision

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Where's the evidence that they're not—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm talking about $80,000 or $90,000, depending on the practice. It's not an ultra-lucrative area of law. These are people who are going into it from a humanitarian impulse. I don't think there's any evidence that the fees are high.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I see this as just a way to protect consultants to continue to practise immigration law, but the best way to protect the public is if a lawyer is on the hook. Why? It's because a lawyer doesn't just go to a community college course and then start hanging out his shingle, right?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, there will be some, as I mentioned. I said that there will always be a few bad apples, but it's a false equivalence when you look at the sheer volume here. I think we missed the boat last time. I think that in 2017, you looked at it, and you're so used to having consultants

Citizenship and Immigration committee  But it's a tribunal. It's life and death at the Immigration and Refugee Board, sir.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. It has always been “buyer beware”. That's the way the system is set up and the unsuspecting public doesn't know that they're not hiring lawyers. With this Queen's University and Université de Sherbrooke program, people are going to graduate with a 500-hour online course and

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a very difficult problem, because then you're going to have people who are going to make these complaints against consultants because they think they can get an open work permit out of it, even when the consultant may not have actually done anything wrong. You'll just go dow

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Firstly, if you're going to go down this route you have to have a huge increase in dues to cover the professional liability and the compensation fund. It has to be massive. The fees that have been paid to date have been nothing relative to.... The law society benefits from econom

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We know there's a long history now of complaints against immigration consultants. If the government is now stepping in, and the minister is giving himself so much power throughout this whole process, the danger, I think, would be that someone could potentially launch a class acti

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The operations people in the department always want to make things simpler, and the policy people are always the ones who understand that life is very complicated. It's very difficult to simplify in the way that you want. We look at this in terms of, why our area of law? To your

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay I'll take that back.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  My view is that it can't be done. We're going to be sitting here in another three or four years. All the examples of fraud and negligence are going to continue. I wonder again, why us? Immigration lawyers are the most bleeding-heart types who go into this area to help people. W

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We heard yesterday that they're going to use some of the VACs as well to try to spread the message, but obviously one person in a country such as India is not a huge amount of resources. My submission on behalf of the Canadian Bar Association last time I was here was that when

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can speak to that. I watched the testimony last night so I did see what the minister said. I actually think the minister was wrong to say that if you're helping out with a form but not for a fee then it's actually providing legal advice and you have to have proper training, bec