:
I call the meeting to order.
Welcome to meeting number 12 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.
Given the ongoing pandemic situation, and in light of the recommendations from the health authorities as well as the directive of the Board of Internal Economy on Thursday, November 25, 2021, to remain healthy and safe, all those attending the meeting in person are to maintain two-metre physical distancing and must wear a non-medical mask when circulating in the room. It is highly recommended that the mask be worn at all times, including when seated. You must maintain proper hand hygiene by using the hand sanitizer provided in the room. Please refrain from coming to the room if you are symptomatic.
As the chair, I will be enforcing these measures for the duration of the meeting, and I thank members in advance for their co-operation.
For those participating virtually, I would like to outline a few rules to follow.
You may speak in the official language of your choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of either floor, English or French audio. If interpretation is lost, please inform me immediately and we will ensure that interpretation is properly restored before resuming the proceedings. The “raise hand” feature at the bottom of the screen can be used at any time if you wish to speak or alert the chair or the clerk.
When you are ready to speak, you can click on the microphone icon to activate your microphone. All comments should be addressed through the chair. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute.
With regard to a speaking list, the committee clerk and I will do our best to maintain a consolidated order of speaking for all members, whether they are participating virtually or in person.
Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on February 1, 2022, the committee is resuming its study of differential outcomes in Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada decisions.
It is my pleasure today to welcome the Honourable Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, before the committee.
Thank you, Minister, for appearing again today.
He's also joined by the departmental officials, Caroline Xavier, associate deputy minister; Pemi Gill, director general, international network; and Farah Boisclair, director, anti-racism task force.
I would now like to welcome the minister, who will begin our discussions with five minutes of opening remarks, followed by rounds of questions.
Minister, you will have five minutes for your opening remarks. Please begin.
:
Thank you so much, Madam Chair.
I'm joining you today from Newfoundland. It's great to be back, making regular appearances before the committee.
[Translation]
Let me begin by saying that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, or IRCC, has zero tolerance for racism, discrimination or harassment of any kind. However, we know that these problems exist throughout the public service and in our department.
If we really want to make a lasting difference, we must first acknowledge this reality. That's why creating safe spaces and an inclusive, healthy workplace is a priority for me, for IRCC's deputy ministers, and for the entire department.
[English]
We have an obligation to listen and to act. Our diversity in Canada is a major strength, and we all benefit, in my opinion, when we reflect that diversity in our public service. This is true for all federal agencies, and especially for IRCC, given its mandate to welcome new Canadians.
The department is committed to diversity and inclusion, not only regarding its employees, but in the work that we do as well, including the fair and non-discriminatory processing of applications that we receive from people of a wide variety of backgrounds.
I'd like to outline a few of the actions we're taking to address this ongoing commitment.
The first major step towards this commitment was to create, in 2020, our anti-racism task force. This task force guides the department's strategy to eliminate racism and applies an anti-racism lens to all of the work, policies and programs we're responsible for.
Overall, IRCC has been actively reviewing its human resource systems so that indigenous, Black, racialized peoples and persons with disabilities are better represented across IRCC at every level.
[Translation]
To this end, we have made 12 departmental commitments to make IRCC a fairer and more diverse place to work, to hold the department to account for its progress in this regard, and to change the composition of our workforce by 2024.
We have also made six commitments on anti-racism service delivery to measure, analyze and evaluate the impact of bias on service delivery, including a review of the services we provide to our African clients.
These commitments are important because only by measuring these parameters can we make changes.
[English]
Also, to deliver on our commitments, we've put in place numerous initiatives and training programs to support decision-makers across our various lines of business. Just a few examples follow.
We've set up a service delivery anti-racism working group that has mandated training to support decision-makers' understanding of procedural fairness and impartiality in the decision-making process.
The department's overseas quality assurance program has been expanded to conduct an annual review of application refusals.
We're mapping available race-related client data to identify possible bias, systemic racism and other barriers.
We're reviewing policies and programs to identify systemic racism or barriers in program and service delivery.
As we modernize and adopt new technologies, we are also developing guidance and implementing measures to mitigate bias and unintended negative consequences.
[Translation]
I would like to stress that we are committed to the fair application of immigration laws. As such, all immigration applications received by IRCC are assessed individually, based on the documentation provided by clients.
[English]
IRCC also has taken a number of steps to make real and lasting changes within the department to ensure that our actions support our commitments.
We've established the three-year anti-racism strategy, which includes in its plans mandatory bias training, mentoring and sponsorship programs; anti-racism work and training objectives included in their performance agreements; leadership programs for under-represented groups; trauma coaching sessions for Black employees and managers to enable them to recognize the impacts of racism on mental health; employee trust circles; racial impact assessment tools for policy development; and other initiatives to support workplace cultural change.
We're also focused on targeted recruitment processes to help meet higher representation levels. We are implementing anti-racism commitments in our leader performance agreements. To this end, IRCC is initiating a new three-year hiring and retention strategy to address the diversity of our workforce.
[Translation]
We are also preparing a talent management bank, where employees can register to be considered for employment opportunities within IRCC. Through such initiatives, we are beginning to see encouraging trends in employment equity, particularly at the entry level.
However, we need to make more progress in the middle and senior management ranks to make our workforce more representative of the Canadian population.
[English]
We need to develop a diverse workforce so that racialized individuals can contribute to our department, especially as leaders, and can inspire others to pursue leadership roles.
Madam Chair, is that the end of my time, or is that a signal that there's a little time left?
:
Again, Minister, I'm speaking on behalf of the IRCC employees who are on some of these records—obviously they don't want to share their names—and people I've talked to, as was mentioned in the same article, about the pressures on racialized employees of IRCC, who are feeling as though even when they go to the bathroom they need to ask. If they take washroom breaks that are too long, they get asked about it, and they're being asked to perform at a higher level.
In the same article, another racialized employee said that there are fewer career advancement opportunities within IRCC for people of colour. He said he noticed over the years a reluctance to promote employees of colour within the department. He said he went through a dozen applications before he got a promotion. There are definitely a lot of problems, and it doesn't seem as though they're coming to an end.
I will move on.
I asked you this question last time with regard to Afghanistan and Ukraine and how people are saying, and rightfully so, that there seems to be a big difference in the processing that's going on and in the priorities. About 10,000 Ukrainians have come here to Canada on a priority basis within a month, but there are still many thousands of Afghans who are stuck there. Recently, through an OPQ, we found out that only about 2,385 Afghans have come here to Canada under the government special refugee program, and that's unacceptable. As you know, the Taliban have ramped up their brutal regime. They're not letting women and young girls go to school anymore. Those Afghans are still frustrated with your government and feel that there's a huge bias against them.
What do you have to say to that?
:
Your comment was generous off the top, Ms. Kayabaga, to point out the timing of some of these problems. I adopt the view that they may not necessarily be my fault, but they are my responsibility and, frankly, my opportunity to address.
To your question about how we can use folks who are here now—or, I would even suggest, within IRCC already—to help address this problem, there is one thing I am struck by. When I come to Ottawa every week and have conversations with people who have different life experiences from mine, who come from a different country of origin or a different ethnic or racial background, the conversation changes. I talk about things differently with different people. We have more informed discussions, and I would like to think we make better decisions.
I had a conversation at a newcomer centre in Alberta during a visit last week, and I raised the fact that there is an incredible spirit of entrepreneurialism among some of the refugees who've come to my community. One of the employees stopped me in my tracks when she said that it's great there is a spirit of entrepreneurialism but that I may not realize, coming from my life experience, that this is driven by the fact that a lot of newcomers or people who come from her community weren't able to land jobs within traditional employment scenarios because they were subjected to racism at the time. To have my eyes opened to something that is so glaringly obvious in retrospect demonstrates to me that if we bring different people from different backgrounds into the conversations, we're going to have healthier discussions and make better decisions.
To your question, a big thing that I think we can do is to adopt training and promotion exercises within the department to ensure that the senior leadership and middle management in a department are not homogenous. To have people who understand the life situations of the people who are applying to come to Canada from different countries, who come from different religious or cultural backgrounds, I think, is one of the chief things we can do.
I don't want to eat up all the time. I have much to say about this, but I'll leave it for your next question.
:
Thank you. I appreciate your answer, and it kind of flows into my next question.
In order to get to the place of addressing discrimination in IRCC and systemic racism, we have to fight for some policies. I remember being part of the group of people who were asking for the UN Decade for People of African Descent to be something that we implement as a policy. Thankfully, we did that.
Would you agree that we should extend that, because this task force was set up in 2020, and it does not give us enough time to be able to address the issues in IRCC?
Before you answer, I'll throw in another question with that.
I had the opportunity to go to Dakar and talk to IRCC members there, who are currently serving 16 to 26 other countries in the area. They're not able to be physically in the other countries they serve. I wonder what impacts the decisions they're making—which are not informed and have no understanding of the countries they're serving—would have on discrimination or the high refusal rates we've seen in African countries?
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank the minister for making himself available, which frankly is to his credit. He has appeared before the committee on a number of occasions, and that deserves to be noted.
The minister and I have been working together for nearly four weeks, particularly on the issue of Ukrainian refugees and the air bridge. For a change, I'm going to talk to him about another issue that is equally important and causing a bit of difficulty for IRCC.
The day before yesterday, Mr. Gideon Christian spoke about racism at IRCC during his testimony to the committee. He told us that we had to face up to it, even if it was disturbing. Of course, all members of the committee are uncomfortable when it comes to racism, but we can name the problem.
My question is quite simple and I would like a yes or no answer.
Minister, is there racism at IRCC?
:
I need to learn, to see what the impact of this approach is going to be first. However, there is a reason we've designed this specific program in regard to the situation in Ukraine.
If I want to contrast it to Afghanistan, there are really two major differences. One is the ease with which Ukrainians have safe passage outside of Ukraine to the west and can find a pathway whereby they can be safely processed and go through our biometric screening process as well. There are huge challenges on the ground, but by comparison, in Afghanistan, we're dealing with specific people we've made a commitment to, who are in a territory where the Taliban are not letting them leave the country and they cannot transit safely throughout or outside of Afghanistan.
The second component is that, from our conversations with European counterparts and the Canadian-Ukrainian community, we expect there is a desire to return amongst the vast majority of those who are coming for a temporary period to Canada from Ukraine.
With respect to Afghanistan, I wish the circumstances were the same. I don't have the same hope that it will be safe for the people we're welcoming permanently as refugees to return home one day, despite their potential desire to do so. That's allowed us to create our different responses for the unique circumstances.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Minister.
Minister, following some of the discussion about Afghanistan, I want to ask you about a specific situation. It's a situation I wrote to you about last week. It's one that's very important to people in my constituency.
One of my constituents travelled to Afghanistan, at obviously great personal risk, to help a family that he was acquainted with leave the country. Subsequently, this constituent of mine raised the finances required to privately sponsor this family. They're in Pakistan now, in a very tenuous situation. The couple are human rights defenders. The man is a human rights lawyer and the woman was a teacher at a girls' school. They were prepared to apply. They were told not to submit their application because the navigation unit is not giving pre-approvals right now due to switching systems.
Can you speak to that technical issue? As well, can you advise on whether you'd be prepared to intervene to expedite this case? I think this is a very worthy case and a very serious situation. These folks are in a very tenuous situation in Pakistan right now.
:
Thank you, Minister. I really appreciate that.
I know a week is a relatively short amount of time in terms of turning around correspondence, and I'm not always that efficient myself, but given the nature of the case and its urgency, I did want to highlight it. Thank you for committing to looking into it and following up on those issues.
I found it interesting that in response to my colleague Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe's question about racism at IRCC, you referred to racism as a “sickness”. I would be more inclined to describe racism as a moral evil, as opposed to a sickness. I suppose the difference is that one implies that it's something that just happens, whereas another implies that there are specific people who are responsible for the things they do and should be held accountable for them.
I was thinking of that description in the context of my colleague Mr. Hallan's pointing out that there have not been consequences for individuals who engage in racist behaviour. I'd like to know if you would agree with my description of racism as a moral evil as opposed to a sickness—maybe it's both—and then also speak to this issue of whether you believe individuals who have engaged in racist behaviour should be held accountable and should be reassigned or removed. What is appropriate in terms of identifying actors and consequences?
:
The processing challenges aren't unique to one line of business or another, though some are impacted to a different degree.
There are three different categories of measures, if I can describe it that way, that we're dealing with to improve the situation. The first is resources; the second is technology, and the third is spaces.
On resources, I shared with you previously that we've hired more than 500 staff, who are now fully trained and working and producing. In addition, the money in the economic and fiscal update, mostly on the temporary side of business, is going to make a meaningful difference.
You would have seen from late January the announcement we made about certain technological features that are coming online, and I believe that was a subject of testimony before this committee previously, so I won't rehash all the details. Suffice it to say that the PR case tracker for family reunification is now online, and people can get real-time updates on their own files. There are a number of other measures I can go into if you wish.
Finally, on spaces, increasing the number of overall spaces will help us play catch-up to a certain degree, but I will say that since January we've now processed more than 143,000 PR applications. By the end of February, in the first two months, we saw more than 100,000 approvals. We are actually processing at a much faster pace than before the end of last year, and it's encouraging to see some of these investments take hold to make a very significant difference in terms of the rate at which we have been able to process in the first few months of this year.
:
I'll apologize in advance, because I don't have an announcement to make at committee today on the date of the next draw.
Sukh, you have been a huge advocate, I have to say, for the parents and grandparents stream in particular. One of the things you and I have discussed before is to make sure that we're doing this in a way that is fair. It's a real challenge, because we have almost 10 times as many applications as we historically have spaces.
I will point out in the two seconds before I run out of time here that we plan, over the next few years, on increasing the spaces from 23,500 to 32,000. We're going to continue to work to try to bring more people through the stream, including one of our former colleagues, the current mayor of Edmonton, who arrived on the parents and grandparents stream when he was only 18, as he followed his family to Canada.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Minister, like my colleague Ms. Kayabaga, I would like to highlight the fact that you have been in office for a short time and there are many problems that existed before you came. However, your political party has been in government since 2015, and in the last seven years, I have not seen many positive changes in IRCC.
I believe you are sincere in your desire to change things. In fact, on several occasions, including last Tuesday at this committee, we were told that the establishment of an immigration ombudsman could ensure that people are better protected from unfair decisions in the processing of their immigration applications.
I have asked you this question twice before, but you seemed ambivalent about it. Today I'm going to ask you more directly, since you say you want to change things.
Do you support the creation of an immigration ombudsman?
:
To put it on the public record for the minister's information, the NDP has called for an ombudsperson for immigration in our platform for years now. We certainly support that, and I think it absolutely is required. I hope the minister will take that seriously and implement something like that.
With respect to differential treatment, it doesn't start in one place but actually is throughout the system. The committee has been advised that racialized women's organizations are being treated differently. They've been asked for a detailed breakdown of admin budget costs, when other sectors are not required to do so.
Settlement officers have to provide additional information to substantiate and justify their decisions, and this extends to clients as well. In India, there's hyper-scrutiny for marriage fraud. Muslim female clients are being asked questions of a sexual nature with regard to their relationship with their male spouses, as proof of marriage. For China, DNA testing is often required for child sponsorship applications. For Africa, genuine parent and child relationships are often questioned.
Will the minister ensure that there is an independent review into these concerns as part of a larger independent review of systemic racism within IRCC and report his findings publicly?
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to address what, to me, seems to be a bit of an elephant in the room. We had the conflict in Afghanistan in the last year, and it continues. In August, the government stated that it wanted to bring in 40,000 Afghans. So far, there have been about 8,500.That's eight months and a little over 1,000 a month. This, of course, is a racialized community in Afghanistan.
We've now had the conflict in Ukraine. You stated that we've brought in 10,000 white Ukrainians in the last three months. That's triple the rate of Afghanistan. Certainly Ukrainians deserve to come here—they need help—but so do the others.
Under your watch, it seems like you've set up a racialized system, a two-tiered system, where white Europeans come in faster than people from Afghanistan. How do you explain that?
:
It's really important for people to understand that this is not the motivation in any way, shape or form.
With respect to the numbers, there are now approximately 9,400 Afghan refugees who have landed in Canada. I had an opportunity to meet with a number of our new neighbours who live in Alberta during a recent visit.
The situation in Ukraine allows and demands a different response. With respect to Afghanistan, these are people, to use your language, whom we are bringing here. These are people who are benefiting from the full suite of settlement supports. We are doing it through a traditional refugee resettlement process.
With respect to Ukraine, we've made it easier for people to come. We're looking at what appropriate supports may look like. We're looking at how we can facilitate people's entry into Canada. The 10,000 who've come have come from the beginning of the year and have largely come here under their own devices. It has more to do with their ability to leave Ukraine, as compared with those who don't have that ability to leave Afghanistan, than it does a decision by the federal government to be more kind to one group of people than another.
:
The key point for me when it comes to the use of advanced analytics is really about making sure that we can process cases as efficiently as possible without compromising the integrity of the process. We want to ensure that every applicant gets a fair chance to make their application and have that application heard.
When we use advanced analytics, essentially what it does is that it identifies the simple cases that don't have any complexity. Think of somebody who has come and returned to Canada many times and has always followed the rules. The use of advanced analytics can identify that application and make sure it's dealt with by someone in the department who will be able to process it fairly quickly.
For situations that have complexities—maybe there was a security flag on a file, or maybe it involves factors that lead to somebody needing to take a deeper look—they will go through the ordinary assessment process and still benefit from an officer who has to go through all the application information.
It is essentially a sorting mechanism that has yielded, for non-complex cases, an 87% increase in efficiency.
If we're dealing with the non-complex cases, which are far more likely to be approved without having to go down and do a deeper analysis, it makes sense to me, because the people who are going into that side of the assessment are not being prejudiced. They're being treated more quickly.
To the extent that there are people who may have more complex cases, every single file still has to be reviewed and approved by a human being who works for IRCC, not a computer system. The system doesn't make recommendations. It doesn't make approvals or rejections, but it allows us, on those simpler cases, to deal with them in a more expeditious way.
:
Thank you for the question.
As the minister was saying, we take the anti-racism strategy very seriously. We don't want to see harassment or discrimination in the department.
One of the things that is paramount in the department—I've seen it, especially since I've been in the job—is that anyone who sees anything wrong should report it. They can tell their immediate supervisor or the senior officer responsible for internal disclosure of wrongdoing. They can tell our Office of Conflict Resolution, or they can tell our Anti-Racism Task Force.
So there are a number of ways in which employees can report a problem. We recognize that sometimes people may not trust the person they can talk to. That's why we make sure that employees are comfortable bringing these issues to the department.
In my opinion, the situation has improved over the last two years. We are making the process more open and less stigmatizing. It is easier to talk about discrimination and harassment. We are also aware that there are gaps and room for improvement in our department.
:
Thank you for the question.
Like I said earlier, there are a number of ways to report wrongdoing. The employee can talk about it with their immediate supervisor, or bring the case to the attention of the senior officer in charge of internal resolutions, for instance, who is independent from the department. They can also report it to the Office of Conflict Resolution, another body that is independent from the department.
In addition, the employee can ask their union for help, depending on the position level, as we are trying to work in partnership with the union, which also has an independent role.
The employee can also reach out to someone in a position at another level, be it the director general or the deputy minister, and not just [technical difficulties].