Health committee  I ask members of the committee to consider this: If there's a worldwide pandemic, who do you want beside you? The answer is, uniformly, your family. Imagine the moments lost. How many miscarriages were taken alone? How many deaths were felt by oneself? How many tragedies were fa

Health committee  Rapid testing and rapid availability of testing are just more tools to allow family reunification, whether or not that's a mixture of quarantine and testing at the border or point of care. Anything we can do to bring families together on a case-by-case basis through broad exempti

Health committee  We are thankful that the Government of Canada has allowed family reunification to occur, although much later than we expected. The question is this, though: How many of them can afford the two-week quarantine once they arrive in Canada, as well as the two-week quarantine when the

Health committee  That's all right.

Health committee  No, they cannot.

Health committee  The system in Alberta, along with the pilots in British Columbia and Ontario for airport testing, will offer wonderful ways to increase the number of reunited families, particularly if we apply what's being used in airports to the land borders, which should be helpful. Once agai

Health committee  There are many countries in the world without the particular border standards or restrictions that Canada has. The compassionate exemptions have been worked in through different family reunifications on a case-by-case basis in other countries. For example, in the U.S. you can act

Health committee  My apologies. In the last goodbye protocol, there must be federal guidelines ensuring reasonable accommodation for Canadian families to have an appropriate bedside presence. Even if families are allowed in the same city, hospitals do not have a uniform bedside process, particula

Health committee  Thanks very much, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, my name is Dr. David Edward-Ooi Poon and I'm the founder of Faces of Advocacy. We are a grassroots Canadian organization with over 9,500 members, established to safely reunite families in Canada during the COVID-19 travel restrictions. Fro

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, the first issue with the form was that it did not have a signature panel for [Technical difficulty—Editor] Canadian. That meant an entire day of people with a form that notaries would not sign. Now this was rectified by the Faces of Advocacy

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Madam Chair, I would answer in French, but I don't speak it very well. An unnecessary dichotomy has been presented to the Canadian people: be with your family and everyone dies, or stay apart forever and everyone lives. The sheer fact that we can have NHL players, film people,

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I thank the ministry for allowing me access to high-level workers. Because of that, we were able to quickly identify that the form was broken. We were able to quickly identify that the Americans had no place to message, and we are able to quickly identify the missing 50 or 200, d

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Correct.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the opportunity. The IT system is a huge ask, but we do believe it is necessary to bring Canada into a new generation of a post-COVID world, in which immigration helps Canadians and is accessible to Canadians. We also suggest the following. We need an ombudsman to

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We want to ensure that people are processed in a timely fashion. If the two-week turnaround time is kept, we are very happy. We want to make sure that the temporary residents who are contributing to society in Canada are also included under the same exemptions. We also want to m