Elizabeth May
Mr. Speaker, quite often a report, even a unanimous one by a standing committee in this place, can go by without a chance to for us to discuss and debate it in the House.
I re-emphasize and agree entirely that the immigration consultant industry is long overdue for regulation. Within my riding of Saanich—Gulf Islands and in my little riding office, we spend at least 80% of our time on immigration and refugee cases. The ones that come to us, after an immigration consultant has “helped” the applicant, are the hardest to unravel, with the the multiple mistakes that have been made. As other hon. members have said, this often has a grievous impact on the lives of peoples and their hopes and dreams of coming to Canada.
I thank the hon. member for bringing this report to us today so we can put additional pressure on the government to tell us what it will do with the report. The need is urgent.
Michelle Rempel – Calgary Nose Hill
Mr. Speaker, my colleague has brought out this theme. I think if anybody stood in this place, it would be the same, that he or she has a full-time staff member just doing immigration case work. Maybe we could do things a little better.
I want to re-emphasize a couple of points. I know that my former colleague Jason Kenney looked at the immigration consultants’ issue. They wanted to try self-governance and self-regulation. I stand here as a Conservative. After hearing testimony, I am glad we tried, but it still does not work.
Today, I want to ask IRCC officials who might be listening to this to support the recommendations in this report, at least generally, in concept and in principle. Then also give us some sense of a timeline and how implementation will occur, prior to the Christmas break, so we can communicate that to stakeholder groups before February or March so this period of uncertainty does not continue for months.