Blaney: Education export: an industry in dire need of a babysitter

2023/09/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary, highlighting the issues and failures. Understates the role of provincial governments in creating the problem by underfunding institutions and thus incentivizing recruitment of international students and the resulting diminishing of education objectives in favour of meeting lower-skilled service and related employment.

So while the federal government needs to take the issue seriously by considering caps and reimposing work time requirements, the provinces have a more important role in shutting down the various private colleges, sometimes under sub-contract to public institutions, that are more employment visa mills than education institutions:

Canada’s export education sector has experienced significant growth in recent years. The federal government has recently completed consultations towards the development of Canada’s third International Education Strategy, coinciding with broader consultations about the future of Canada’s immigration system. Significant changes to Canada’s International Student Program (ISP) are expected in the coming year.

Canada’s education export growth has been unmatched in recent years, but these accomplishments may also be its Achilles’ heel.

Some of its competitor countries have proceeded with more modest growth, while developing and enhancing their policy and regulatory frameworks to ensure sustainability. Canada’s current approach is highly susceptible to unwanted behaviours and future deflation if student expectations don’t match student experiences.

For a number of years, the international education sector has contributed more than CA$20 billion (US$14.6 billion) to the Canadian economy, supporting approximately 170,000 jobs. This roughly equates to the size and value of Canada’s aerospace industry.

However, while there are a plethora of federal regulations impacting the aerospace sector, only a handful impact an international student’s immigration process, and zero federal regulations govern international student recruitment.

Canada now appears ready to reconsider some of the sector-wide issues and its current highly unregulated approach. Whether the new policy initiatives will lead to a sustainable path forward, or allow the status quo to flourish, remains to be seen. However, this may be the federal government’s last chance to act before irreparable harm is perpetuated on Brand Canada.

Brand Canada: Advantages and challenges

Brand Canada has been recognised as the main value proposition by which to lay the foundation for Canada’s education export. Selling international education abroad has come with automatic advantage, based on positive perceptions of Canada, including the standards and values Canada represents.

This country brand advantage should not be considered unique to educational exports, but rather it is an advantage to many areas of Canada’s trade and investment. Mechanisms ensuring the quality of products and services are important.

In recent years, a number of occasions have been reported where Canada’s ISP has not been measuring up to the standards international students have been led to expect.

A lack of housing means that some international students haven’t been able to secure safe accommodation.

Other areas of concern include issues such as international student dependency on food banks and even much darker concerns about illicit drug use, prostitution and even suicide.

Furthermore, some education providers seem to have been poorly prepared to accommodate the sharp growth in student numbers. Provincial government authorities have not taken sufficient action despite concerns on record that some offerings are likely to be deficient in terms of facilities, academic delivery or student support.

The quality of education received has been called into question by recent government oversight audits. For instance, in 2021 in Ontario the auditor general expressed concerns about the processes used to validate whether private colleges are providing quality education. In this context, concerns related to Brand Canada deflation can no longer be considered blown out of proportion.

Band aid solution or brand reboot?

Amidst growing media reports highlighting foul play in Ontario’s international education sector, a registered lobby group, Colleges Ontario, assembled college presidents province-wide to lay out a ‘Standards of Practice’.

However, it is unclear to what extent this type of self-regulatory approach will lead to any significant improvements. For instance, the institution with the largest international student body refused to sign the statement of principles.

Some stakeholders who find the current status quo acceptable or want to see a relaxation of the rules that exist are those who are most likely to be exploiting the gaps in policy and oversight.

For instance, some overseas recruiters are purchasing institutions in Canada and consequently control the full cycle of recruitment, admissions and administration. This may enable alarming business practices, such as producing fake tuition receipts or transcripts for students who have never attended classes.

Some colleges continue to be listed by the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) despite the suspicions that many of their enrolled international students are not actively pursuing their studies. The data received under the Access to Information Act show potential non-compliance rates that are extremely high (89%-100 %).

Practices at public institutions also have concerning aspects if international students’ best interests are considered, such as brazen tuition fee increases, with the cost of tuition sometimes doubling from one intake to the next.

Some institutions also issue up to multiple times the volume of letters of acceptance than they have enrolment capacity for, then rescind them at the last minute or force large volumes of deferrals to intake periods up to two years later.

It is unclear whether, and to what extent, admission standards have been compromised, but the data received under the Freedom of Information Act demonstrate that some institutions issue letters of acceptance to 99% of all international applicants.

The promise of permanence

The draw of skilled, high-paying post-graduation employment opportunities is another example of a Brand Canada promise that has now worn thin.

Offshore-based education agencies run campaigns linking the prospects of international education in Canada to the realisation of wealth and success at a young age, justifying the cost of international tuition fees to new cohorts.

However, there is limited evidence to support these claims, and research points to issues where international graduates often have to accept precarious or low-skilled employment and-or poorer economic outcomes.

Of most grave concern is also Canada’s biggest draw: the prospects of students transitioning to permanent residency. This education-immigration pathway is often marketed openly and routinely abroad, with the standard marketing spiel holding that upon completion of an academic programme and a post-graduation work phase, students will have the opportunity to stay in Canada permanently – as if it was that simple.

For instance, 2022 data obtained under the Access to information Act from IRCC suggests that only about 10% of people transition annually to permanent residency through Canada’s post-graduation work permit programme. While other options exist, these are limited in volume and-or rife with the potential for exploitation.

Is the gig up?

There are some signs that the IRCC is set to take some meaningful action. There can be no doubt that one of the greatest irritants to the federal government, caused by lack of oversight and control, has been the strained resources and resulting immigration processing backlogs caused by a dramatic increase of non-bona fide study permit volumes.

The federal government is the party that has the most to lose. Once Brand Canada is damaged, the value proposition used for education exports becomes untenable. The way the advantages of a positive Brand Canada have filled up classrooms is the same way negative impressions can sink future investment, contracts and collaboration – for generations.

The damage to Brand Canada comes with a real long-term cost that reaches well beyond the international education sector. That is exactly what should be motivating significant federal action now, if protecting the interests of international students is not seen as an equally worthy cause to do so. In the education-export industry, Brand Canada has been without a babysitter for too long.

Earl Blaney is a regulated Canadian immigration consultant who has been an outspoken critic of Canada’s international study policy. Most of his research focuses on exposing concerns associated with inadequate consumer protection standards in Canada’s edu-export industry. Dr Pii-Tuulia Nikula is a principal academic at the Eastern Institute of Technology (Te Pukenga) in New Zealand. Most of Pii-Tuulia’s research focuses on international student recruitment and sustainability questions within the international education sector.

Source: Education export: an industry in dire need of a babysitter

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‘Impossible situation’: Ottawa’s lengthy delays in processing citizenship for adopted kids has parents scrambling

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Unfortunate yet another example of IRCC delays:

Backlogs within Canada’s immigration bureaucracy are creating what one observer calls an “impossible situation” for families adopting children from outside of the country, with processing delays now far outlasting their children’s visas and rendering the kids ineligible for provincial health coverage.

Last weekend, Greg Hanniman and wife Marli Nicol arrived home from Bulgaria with their newly adopted two-year-old son Aleksandar, at the end of a long and expensive process for the Arnprior, Ont. family.

While Aleksandar is adjusting well to his new home and family, Hanniman says they’re now dealing with maddening uncertainty as they wait for bureaucracy at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to even begin processing Aleksandar’s application for citizenship.

Children adopted overseas are usually granted a six-month temporary residence permit, essentially a tourist visa, upon entering Canada. That used to be sufficient to allow IRCC to finish processing their citizenship applications. But delays for processing citizenship for adopted kids are now running close to two years, well past the expiry of temporary visas. That is leaving parents scrambling to get extensions and the children ineligible for basic social programs.

“The major concern we have now obviously is health care,” said Hanniman, a Canadian Armed Forces combat veteran who now works in the computer industry.

The couple began looking into adoption in 2019 and, after meeting Aleksandar in Bulgaria earlier this year and falling in love with him, they submitted their paperwork to IRCC in March.

“It’s clear that he will be granted his citizenship, there’s really no reason why he won’t, but now we have to wait years for the bureaucracy to sort itself out.”

Pavel Georgiev, intercountry adoption co-ordinator with Toronto-based Loving Heart International Adoption Agency, said adopting from out of country entails a two-step process to obtain Canadian citizenship for the child.

In the past, IRCC’s turnaround times for the first part’s approval — where the parents notify where they’re adopting from and demonstrate they are both citizens —  was well within the six-month tourist-visa window, Georgiev said. But these approvals are now taking upwards of 20 months. And families are being placed in the position of their newly adopted children overstaying their visas.

“Throughout my 10-plus years of experience in the field of intercountry adoption, this is by far the longest waiting times we’ve seen,” Georgiev said.

“It’s a bit of an impossible situation for adoptive parents.”

Upon landing in Montreal on August 27, Hanniman said he managed to convince immigration officers to grant Aleksandar a two-year visitor record instead of the standard six-month visitor visa. Taking Aleksander back to Bulgaria after a visitor visa expires in six months would have been a non-starter, Hanniman said. And he wasn’t ready to wait nearly two years to bring their son home while IRCC processes his citizenship application

While the extended residency permit has solved most of the family’s short-term problems, it still leaves Aleksandar ineligible for Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) coverage until his paperwork makes its way through IRCC.

“We have his doctor appointment Tuesday and a dentist on Thursday, but once again, without OHIP, it’s going to be all coming out-of-pocket,” Hanniman said.

When he recently called IRCC to find out the next steps, he said the phone agent told him the government wouldn’t even begin to look at the file until 19 months had passed.

Parents have so far dealt with the uncertainty either by persistently hounding IRCC or their local MP to speed up the approvals, Georgiev said. But he said these are not acceptable solutions.

“Many children who are adopted through intercountry adoption will want to take the child to have a complete assessment by their family doctor,” Georgiev said. But without health coverage, parents are left to pay the medical costs.

Hanniman said he isn’t looking forward to dealing with IRCC when it finally gets around to processing Aleksandar’s paperwork.

“They were not helpful in the slightest,” he said. “They didn’t even try to help.”

IRCC spokesperson Mary Rose Sabater said that IRCC “understands the emotional and financial hardship” experienced in these situations.

She said the two-step process “may take up to six to eight months from start to finish. Depending on the child’s country of origin, it is not unusual for the process to last for two years or even longer.”

Enacting separate adoption-specific immigration streams could help alleviate backlogs, Georgiev said. Once IRCC receives confirmation that an adoption has actually been completed, he said, the government could expedite the paperwork.

“If there were a standardized process through which, once notified and shown documentation that an adoption has been finalized they expedite their review of the part one application and issuance of the approval, that would entirely resolve this problem,” he said.

Processing delays and red tape have become a common complaint for those dealing with Canada’s immigration bureaucracy.

International invitees and delegates, mostly from Africa and southeast Asia, scheduled to attend last year’s Collision technology conference in Toronto were left in the dark after backlogs left them without visas.

Similar processing delays prevented hundreds of African researchers and advocates from attending last year’s International AIDS conference in Montreal, despite many applying months in advance.

Source: ‘Impossible situation’: Ottawa’s lengthy delays in processing citizenship for adopted kids has parents scrambling

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Missing million temporary residents in figures casts doubt on how many have jobs: report 

2023/09/07 Leave a comment

Good analysis by Mikal Skuterud along with policy implications:

A discrepancy of around a million temporary residents between official figures from two federal bodies is leaving Canada in the dark about how many of those residents actually have jobs, an economist is warning.

Mikal Skuterud, a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo, also says Statistics Canada may be dramatically undercounting the number of temporary residents, including international students and temporary foreign workers, employed in Canada. He describes the findings in a report to be published later this week by the C.D. Howe Institute.

The report notes that Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey – which is used to set Canada’s unemployment rate – suggests there were 503,079 temporary residents with jobs in Canada in December last year.

But Mr. Skuterud says information from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the federal department that issues work permits and study visas to foreign nationals, suggests there were 1,585,664 temporary residents with jobs at that time.

“The problem is that the margin of the difference has become so large, now exceeding one million workers, that labour market analysts are increasingly in the dark,” Mr. Skuterud says in a summary of the report.

He told The Globe and Mail that he believes the true number probably falls somewhere between the survey figures and the IRCC numbers.

“I want to know the truth,” he said. “What’s the true number here? The reality is that nobody knows what the truth is – nobody. And that’s a problem.”

The report says undercounting of temporary residents in labour force figures could have a serious impact on planning to alleviate labour shortages, and could also affect wages.

Mr. Skuterud said accurately assessing the contribution of temporary residents in alleviating labour shortages is crucial for policy-makers.

“As this population continues to surge, the significance of this measurement issue is critical,” he added.

The report, Canada’s Missing Workers: Temporary Residents Working in Canada, says there has been a large increase in the number of temporary residents working in Canada since 2006. Since then, the report says, the discrepancy between the IRCC and Statistics Canada figures has widened.

Mr. Skuterud’s analysis found that Statistics Canada’s labour market survey suggests an increase of 391,600 temporary residents with jobs from 2006 to December, 2022.

But IRCC data – which include information on international students permitted to work, as well as temporary residents in the temporary foreign worker program and the international mobility program – suggest an increase of 1,330,404 over the same period, the report says.

The report does not account for undocumented people working illegally in Canada.

“Since the inflow of temporary residents shows no signs of slowing, it is imperative and urgent that Statistics Canada and IRCC revise their data collection to obtain better estimates of employment in the temporary resident population,” the report concludes.

Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC Capital Markets, cautioned federal ministers at their August cabinet retreat that there may be around one million more temporary residents living in Canada than government estimates suggest. He reiterated this in a report, published last week.

Melissa Gammage, a spokesperson for Statistics Canada, said in a statement last week that the agency’s statistics on non-permanent residents “are accurate, produced using robust mechanisms and in collaboration with many stakeholders.”

But she said the agency constantly reviews its methodology, and that starting on Sept. 27 it will publish new data tables on non-permanent residents “computed using a revised methodology and going back to 2021.”

The new tables will include new details on non-permanent residents, “such as their estimated numbers and permit types, as well as other methodological improvements,” Ms. Gammage said.

Mr. Skuterud said it is if unclear if this new methodology will include better estimates of employment in the temporary resident population.

The Labour Force Survey samples around 60,000 Canadian households every month and identifies the work activities of people 15 and older. It has lower response rates in certain subpopulations, which may lead to a downward bias in its estimates, Mr. Skuterud’s report says.

The report says there are also serious questions about the accuracy of the IRCC figures, which it says may have an “upward bias.” This could have partly to do with the fact that holders of valid work permits and study permits are not always employed for the entire time their papers are valid. And some temporary residents might hold both types of permits, potentially leading to double counting.

“Unfortunately, with available data sources, it is impossible to determine the magnitude of the upward bias in the estimates based on the administrative data from IRCC,” the report says.

Source: Missing million temporary residents in figures casts doubt on how many have jobs: report

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Immigration Canada to set up new office to address staff racism complaints by this fall

2023/08/08 Leave a comment

Typical government response: set up a new office rather than fixing existing processes and offices, compounding the high growth rate of the public service and unlikely to dramatically improve or change the situation:

After multiple workforce surveys probing racism and discrimination toward employees, the federal Immigration Department says it is in the process of setting up an independent ombudsperson’s office, expected to be up and running by this fall.

“As with any effort toward real, lasting, and systemic change, we are not going to fix things overnight,” a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) wrote to CBC News in a statement.

The department said it would be creating an equity secretariat that will support “safe and independent channels for reporting racism and discrimination,” more accountability for senior managers, and also include an ombudsperson’s office available to all of its employees.

Source: Immigration Canada to set up new office to address staff racism complaints by this fall

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

Immigration Canada staff in postings abroad mocked, harassed by managers: employee survey

2023/08/04 Leave a comment

Of note. Wonder what the data says about separations by the various equity groups and disaggregated groups for IRCC (overall government data indicate lower for visible minorities, particularly for Black public servants How well is the government meeting its diversity targets? An intersectionality analysis):

Multiple employees at the federal government’s Immigration Department said they were subject to racist micro-aggressions, harassment and professional marginalization during postings in its offices abroad, according to a survey commissioned by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Staff cited management making fun of their accents, and group leaders expressing “overt disdain and even hatred for people from certain countries and for immigrants to Canada in general, using racial slurs and stating support for violence against people from other countries,” according to a summary of the survey’s findings published by the department.

“Being a black person here is an extreme sport. I kid you not. We are not protected,” one employee is quoted saying in the document.

Source: Immigration Canada staff in postings abroad mocked, harassed by managers: employee survey

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed with information requests. Ottawa was warned – but did nothing

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

Well worth reading given depth of analysis and extent of problem:

A few months into his job, Michael Olsen realized he had a problem.

As director-general of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s access to information division from 2014 to 2018, he was in charge of the teams collecting public servants’ e-mails, reports, presentations, memos and other documents in response to access requests. It was delicate work. Mr. Olsen likes to joke he was the most hated man in the entire department.

A worrying trend had emerged: The number of access requests to IRCC was growing – and that growth was accelerating. “Volumes were always higher,” Mr. Olsen said. “They were never coming down.”

Under the federal Access to Information Act, people can force the government to disclose records that would otherwise be inaccessible. This legal mechanism is intended to promote transparency and act as a check on power. In practice, using it means filling out an online form, paying a $5 fee, then waiting for documents to arrive. (In other jurisdictions, these are often called freedom of information requests.)

Roughly a decade ago, lawyers, consultants and individuals realized they could better navigate the immigration system by using access legislation. IRCC ordinarily provides immigration applicants with minimal information during the process; if their cases run into problems, they often have no easy way of finding out why. But the department is required to respond to access requests, and its answers can reveal why cases have been rejected or become stuck in abeyance.

This meant Mr. Olsen’s office was gradually being turned into an immigration case file retrieval-and-delivery operation.

He began warning his superiors. Each year, he gave presentations to senior management – the deputy minister, as well as their associates and assistants, who together make up the top public servants overseeing Canada’s immigration system – showing the blistering pace at which access requests were being filed.

“It looks like we’re going to hit a wall in three years,” he cautioned them in 2015. (That year, IRCC received 34,066 access requests.) A year later: “It looks like we’re going to hit a wall in two years.” (41,660 requests.) Twelve months later: “We’re going to hit a wall next year.” (50,728.) “I didn’t beat my shoe on the table or anything like that,” Mr. Olsen recalled. “I did say, ‘You can see the projections as well as I can.’” But changes that might have addressed the torrent of requests never came.

Eventually, IRCC hit that wall.

Over a decade, IRCC has seen a 763-per-cent increase in access requests, from roughly 20,000 in the fiscal year ending March, 2012, to about 177,000 in the 2022 fiscal year. The influx of filings has become so overwhelming that IRCC now accounts for 80 per cent of all access requests made to the federal government.

That onslaught will only worsen. Last year, the government announced it was aiming to admit a record 500,000 new permanent residents a year by 2025. (To put that number in perspective, in 2019 Canada admitted 341,000 permanent residents.) This would be in addition to the millions of permits, visas and authorizations issued each year to workers, students and visitors.

As IRCC strives to meet its aggressive new targets, critics and insiders say the department first needs to tame how it interacts with the access to information system, a relationship that has morphed into something beyond its control – bogging down its internal processes, costing taxpayers money and giving rise to a cottage industry of experts who flood the system with requests.

The volume of requests the department receives has also begun affecting areas outside immigration. IRCC’s ever-increasing appetite for access staff is straining an already limited pool of experts within the government, and a majority of federal access disputes handled by the Office of the Information Commissioner are now related to immigration requests. Other departments involved in immigration matters, such as the federal border agency, are also now facing higher request volumes.

In effect, the federal access to information system, which is supposed to hold the entire government to account, has been hijacked by the immigration system. Faced with an unending stream of requests, IRCC’s leadership – including several successive immigration ministers – have been slow to address the root causes of the deluge now threatening Canada’s immigration and access systems, according to internal government records obtained through access requests and interviews with more than 20 experts.

This is made all the more puzzling by the fact that IRCC has known of a potential solution for years, one that has been championed by many current and former public servants: Give applicants as much of their case files as possible without requiring access requests.

“I think you could say that there was a problem,” said Mr. Olsen, who retired in late 2018. “It was identified. Sadly, not enough has been done yet to address that problem.”

In a statement, IRCC spokesperson Rémi Larivière said the department “is striving to implement initiatives that will address the root causes of the increase in access requests and corresponding complaints.”

During any immigration process, applicants submit forms and supporting documentation, which are then reviewed by case officers. Often, those officers will need additional information, such as a security assessment from a different government department or additional banking information, before a case can proceed. This can put an application on hold for months – or years. In other instances, officers may not be satisfied by an applicant’s submission, and may issue a formal refusal letter.

IRCC’s communications with applicants are brief. If a file is on hold, there could be no correspondence whatsoever; if a file is rejected, the refusal letter may only include a sentence or two about why the application did not succeed.

In nearly every access request made to the department, the same database is searched: the Global Case Management System, IRCC’s bespoke immigration software. GCMS is the beating heart of Canadian immigration. The system stores submitted documents, tracks correspondence between IRCC and applicants and logs case officers’ comments.

These “GCMS notes,” as experts call them, are all drearily similar. They’re a lengthy list of application details, as if all the fields on a government form were unceremoniously dumped, line after line, into a document dozens of pages long. The most important information usually lies in the cryptic write-ups from case officers, which note status updates and issues with applications, such as missing documents.

GCMS, painstakingly built over many years to streamline operations, wasn’t designed to give people direct access to their case files. Applicants, lawyers and consultants, hungry for any information that would tell them what they needed to know to get a file moving again – or explain in detail why an application was rejected – realized these files were subject to federal access law. The requests poured in.

In 2021, 99 per cent of all the requests IRCC received were for immigration case files, according to an internal memo to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser. (The other 1 per cent of requests were for what the department refers to as “corporate records,” such as internal correspondence, communications, presentations – policy-oriented documents often requested by researchers, businesses and the media.)

To Robert Orr, assistant deputy minister of operations at IRCC from 2012 to 2017 and the person ultimately responsible for immigration processing, the department’s hands appeared to be tied as the number of immigration applications grew.

“Once we got into big volumes of applications, we had a choice: We either communicate with applicants about what’s happening, or we get on and process applications,” he said. “And so we were choosing the latter.”

“It had taken so long to develop GCMS that I was a bit reluctant from an operations point of view to start over, doing something that was new,” Mr. Orr continued. “We recognized the importance of giving as much information to people as we could, but we were struggling with the best way to do it.”

As director-general of access to information at IRCC, Mr. Olsen did not have the power to do anything about how much information was pre-emptively shared with prospective immigrants. Instead, he focused on wringing as much efficiency out of IRCC’s access process as he could. But those measures only went so far.

Access work at IRCC can be gruelling. In 2022, when the department received about 177,000 access requests, it had the equivalent of 122 full-time access employees, according to data from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. That’s roughly 1,460 files per person.

Ultimately, the issues that plague IRCC’s access unit come from outside – from a community of immigration professionals and applicants who have been unintentionally incentivized by IRCC to file access requests. Another issue is GCMS, an intricate and stubborn piece of software that is difficult to modify and more than a decade old.

There’s also a problem of political will.

“There’s immigration, and then there’s [access requests] about immigration,” Mr. Olsen said. “If a politician has to choose what to get right, what are they going to choose?”

“I think it’s fair to say that people had recognized the limitations of GCMS long before I left the department,” he continued. “But that’s a really big, really expensive item to throw at the government.”

Through his spokesperson, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser declined The Globe and Mail’s requests for an interview.

Manmeet Rai’s access to information empire began on an online forum.

In 2016, Mr. Rai, who had recently graduated from law school in the United States, was attempting to immigrate to Canada. He prepared and submitted the paperwork himself – given his legal background, he didn’t see the need to hire a lawyer or consultant. Months passed without an answer from IRCC.

Frustrated, he learned from an online immigration forum that an access request for his GCMS notes might tell him what he needed to know to get his file moving again. But there was a snag: Only citizens, permanent residents and other individuals or corporations currently in Canada are eligible to file federal access requests. Mr. Rai was none of these.

He found an online service that could serve as his proxy. It filed the request on his behalf and sent him the documents once they were available. He recalls it costing US$25, or $34, much more than the $5 fee charged by the government.

Mr. Rai, who had taken to helping others on that same forum, saw the growing demand for GCMS notes, so he created his own request-proxying service, GetGCMS.com. The site could process credit cards that weren’t enabled for international charges, which are common in India.

“This was not my full-time job,” Mr. Rai told The Globe. “I was just doing it initially as a hobby. And then it just blew up big time.”

Business was good. Within a few years, he was handling anywhere from 5,000 to 9,000 access requests annually. During one “blockbuster” year, he said, GetGCMS took in more than $150,000 in revenue, before expenses. (Mr. Rai, now a Crown prosecutor in Saskatchewan, has since stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the business. GetGCMS is run by his partner.)

GetGCMS charges $20 to obtain the basic notes stored in GCMS about an applicant. More detailed access requests cost as much as $75. In other words, at a minimum, the site is charging people four times more than what they would pay if they filed these requests themselves. And it has recently become possible for anyone – including non-citizens and non-permanent residents outside Canada – to file these requests for free, under a separate federal law called the Privacy Act.

“If you ethically ask me, should I be charging them $20 for something that they can do for free? Well, yes, they can do it for free,” Mr. Rai admitted. “But the thing is, you can file your immigration application or your visa application yourself and just pay $100, right? You don’t have to go down to a lawyer, or you don’t have to go down to a consultant and engage their services.”

In Mr. Rai’s experience, most people using the service don’t want to bother learning how to use the access system. To them, the premium charged by GetGCMS is worth it – and a pittance compared with what a lawyer or immigration consultant might charge for an access request, to say nothing of IRCC’s own filing fees. (A permanent resident application usually costs more than $1,000.)

Over the years, other businesses offering request-proxying services for immigration applicants have popped up, and these services have become a thorn in IRCC’s side. Immigration lawyers and consultants have also taken to automatically filing access requests on their clients’ behalf. (The Globe filed an access request to IRCC in September for data that could quantify the volume of filings coming from organizations like GetGCMS. The department’s reply to that request is now about eight months overdue.)

Mr. Rai said his e-mails to IRCC’s access unit would go unanswered, forcing him to file formal complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner, the federal organization responsible for handling access disputes. “[IRCC] thought that I was just there to mint money,” he said. “I initially felt bad. I don’t feel bad now.”

Around 2018, Mr. Rai noticed requests were taking longer to be completed, and that the government was more often missing its legal deadlines. He and otherscomplained about these delays, too. A year later, he realized IRCC was claiming 90-day extensions on all new requests coming from GetGCMS. Internal IRCC e-mails Mr. Rai obtained through access requests show the department singled out him and four other so-called “bulk requesters” for these automatic extensions. The dispute was resolved only after the Office of the Information Commissioner stepped in and told the government the pre-emptive extensions were “inconsistent” with the law.

Because of all these new complaints, the commissioner’s office has found itself facing a surge of new work. In the 2022-23 fiscal year, 63 per cent of all federal access complaints were regarding IRCC.

In an ideal world, Mr. Rai said, he would be put out of business by the government. Prospective immigrants looking for information on their applications shouldn’t have to file requests, he argued. “It is a waste of time, resources, money. The government’s spending so much money on hiring people, processing these access requests,” he said. “I have maintained this position for many years.”

“We can shut down and be happy.”

The deluge of access requests at IRCC will almost certainly get worse over the next few years, in part because of a quiet policy change that threatens IRCC’s access system with collapse.

Since July, 2022, a new federal regulation has allowed anyone in the world to file a personal information request under the Privacy Act to the federal government. These requests work almost identically to access requests, but apply only to information a government body holds about the requester. Crucially, these requests carry no fees, meaning that since 2022 all immigration applicants have been able to request their own files for free. (Most aren’t aware of this, or prefer to offload the work to lawyers, consultants or businesses like GetGCMS.)

An internal IRCC memo from 2021 attempted to game out the consequences of different rates of growth in the numbers of requests under this new regime, and the increases in work for access officers that might result. The projections were alarming: The memo said that if one out of every 20 immigration applicants were to file requests, the department would receive around 332,000 filings in the fiscal year ending March, 2023. If one in five people exercised these new rights, that number would be roughly 706,000. The memo did not say whether the department considered either of these scenarios likely to occur, and IRCC has not yet disclosed its 2023 request volumes. In 2022, the department received more than 26,000 privacy requests, in addition to the roughly 177,000 requests it received under access legislation.

In the one-in-five scenario, accounting for current request growth rates, IRCC would be facing 926,000 requests a year by March, 2024. The rest of the federal government combined saw about 113,000 access and privacy requests in the 2022 fiscal year.

That amount of requests to IRCC would grind the federal access system to a halt.

The most valuable resources in any access system are the staff members who process requests. At the federal level, access units have struggled to hire and retain people, and it has become common for departments to poach each others’ workers.

During an appearance before the House of Commons access to information committee earlier this year, Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard warned that IRCC’s ravenous demand for staff would constrain the labour market for access experts. “If you’re going to give more information through access requests, you clearly need to have more people working in access units,” she said.

A sharp increase in requests would also carry more direct costs to taxpayers. According to statistics from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, IRCC spent a total of $10.9-million in 2022 to handle a combined 204,000 access and privacy requests, more than double what it spent in 2012. It also spent $475,000 on two contracts to LRO Staffing, an employment agency, between 2019 and 2022. The company handled more than 2,300 requests, according to a document tabled in the House of Commons. If IRCC’s access volumes were to swell further, itsbudget would also need to grow considerably.

While the department receives the bulk of federal requests, some of those require consultation with other government institutions, such as the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which are now also facing surges.

Many of those requests also trigger complaints to the Office of the Information Commissioner (which adjudicates requests made under the Access to Information Act) or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (which handles requests under the Privacy Act). If volumes increased, both offices would have to direct more staff and funds to immigration-related complaints, reducing the resources available to other requesters, including academics, activists, journalists and the general public. (The Information Commissioner is currently investigating the Canada Border Services Agency as a result of increasing immigration-related access complaints.)

IRCC has announced plans to update GCMS, part of what it calls its “Digital Platform Modernization” project. This would give applicants a greater understanding of their place in the application queue, and more detailed refusal reasons. But those changes are years away, according to Andrew Koltun, an Ontario-based immigration lawyer at LJD Law who researches IRCC’s access to information processes.

While the department has built some public-facing services that share information about the status of an applicant’s file, Mr. Koltun said these tools aren’t very detailed. “I would say that Domino’s Pizza Tracker, when you make a delivery order, is far more detailed in tracking status than IRCC’s trackers are,” he said.

There are other ways of tracking a file’s status. If an applicant is in Canada, they can call an IRCC call centre, where agents are able to look up a GCMS file and read it over the phone. But those calls were answered only 19 per cent of the time in 2021, according to an internal memo. The department’s service standards say the answer rate should be at least 50 per cent.

Mr. Koltun believes applicants should have nearly full access to their GCMS files. “I love the idea that you should have access to your default GCMS notes,” he said. “I think there would be a lot of institutional pressure that would make sure that never happened.”

In part, this comes down to IRCC’s own risk policy, which “is very protective in saying an applicant should never learn anything about the system, because the more someone learns about how the system works, the more likely it is that someone will be able to manipulate this to gain an immigration benefit,” Mr. Koltun said.

The fact that IRCC is now receiving as many requests as it does “speaks to a lack of transparency that immigration applicants face throughout the system,” he said, “and speaks to a paternalism from IRCC that you’re not owed anything as an applicant.”

With updates to GCMS trickling in over the next several years, the department has no choice but to try to curb the demand for access requests, either by improving applicants’ access to documents, thus eliminating the need for requests, or by restricting who can file them in the first place.

In 2020, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, which is responsible for overseeing the administration of federal access law, solicited submissions from various departments as part of a review of government access policies. IRCC’s submission, disclosed by the Treasury Board in response to an access request, asked for limits on who is able to file requests, and the ability to put requests on hold indefinitely during “exceptional circumstances” (the submission noted the pandemic as an example). It also asked that the access filing fee (currently $5 across the government) be set at the discretion of institution heads, and that deadlines be calculated using business days instead of calendar days, which would give IRCC more time to respond.

In part, the submission was a direct response to the internet services filing access requests on behalf of applicants, like GetGCMS. “We would like to see the ATIA reform address the issue of representatives using the Access to Information system for their own personal benefit,” the submission said.

To Mr. Koltun, IRCC’s submission was a cry for help, but the changes it proposed would ultimately mean constraining people’s rights.

“I don’t think anyone sat back and said, ‘Okay, if this is what the system is, what does this mean from a requester perspective?,” Mr. Koltun said. “What does this do to the democratic notion of a right to access?”

In April, 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Treasury Board held a “business resumption” conference call, hoping to get stalled access units back to processing requests in a new era of remote work.

During the meeting, managers shared their approaches, according to meeting minutes released through an access request. Some organizations had begun sending documents via e-mail. Others, including IRCC, were putting requests on hold indefinitely. Audrey White, then the head of IRCC’s access unit, spoke bluntly: The department’s mandate was to process immigration files – not access requests.

Today, it is clear that access to information is as much a part of the immigration system as border agents and background checks. When the federal access to information system was established 40 years ago, legislators did not intend for this to happen – and yet it has.

In 2021, Ms. Maynard, the Information Commissioner, published a detailed investigation into IRCC’s access woes, which laid out a series of recommendations. Chief among them was the idea that applicants’ files should be available without access requests. “Imagine if you had to ask, through an access request, for information about your taxes,” Ms. Maynard told the House access committee earlier this year. “You don’t have to, because you have a portal where you can go and see your information.”

Despite a commitment to change from Marco Mendicino, who was immigration minister until 2021, the department “has yet to offer applicants any alternative methods to access the information they are seeking on their immigration files,” according to Ms. Maynard’s latest annual report, published earlier this week.

In response, Mr. Larivière, the IRCC spokesperson, said the department believes it is on track to resolve these issues, but did not provide further detail.

Even Alec Attfield, a public servant who was until recently in charge of IRCC’s citizenship program, said it is time to take pressure off the system by making case files accessible without formal access requests – and he said the federal government’s ambitious immigration targets are in jeopardy if the status quo persists.

Mr. Attfield, who was the director-general of citizenship at IRCC from 2016 to the end of 2021, said that while information is already obtainable through access to information requests, that access is slow and burdening the department.

“Clients should have access to their case files, their written notes,” he said, with exceptions for information that might affect national security. “Until you have the proper information systems in place, growing immigration volumes are going to put further pressure on access to information and our ability to respond to people’s requests for status on their files. It’s just a fundamental thing.”

It’s still unclear when – or if – IRCC will get to a point where it gives applicants all the information they need, without them having to resort to access requests. Until then, immigration will be restrained by the access to information system.

“Canada is keen to grow its immigration levels,” Mr. Attfield said. “Without a proper system, we won’t be able to achieve those targets.”

In the meantime, the current system is having real-world consequences.

Sunkar Shagambayev, a 32-year-old immigrant from Kazakhstan, came to Canada in 2019 with his wife, Sitora, and their son, Alan. They’re a strikingly handsome family, with photos proudly displayed on the walls of their home in Tillsonburg, Ont. Those pictures depict a fourth person: Sabika, their adopted daughter, whose immigration file has been stuck in bureaucratic limbo since 2020. Each time the Shagambayevs have filed for a permit that would allow Sabika, 14, to enter the country, they have been rejected.

Mr. Shagambayev is unable to get a straight answer as to why the federal government has repeatedly denied the teenager’s study permit. “They’re very vague,” he said. “They never tell you what the real reason is.” The rest of the family have had similar troubles: Their permanent residence applications, first submitted in early 2020, have yet to be approved or rejected. Deeply frustrated by the lack of information from IRCC, Mr. Shagambayev has taken to filing access requests – he’s up to nine so far.

Last week, after prodding IRCC through his lawyer, Mr. Shagambayev received a call from a case officer, who said his file had begun moving again.

The process has taken a mental toll. “I had problems with sleep,” he said. “For maybe two years, I was waking up at night and I was thinking about it, like, ‘What can I do? What can be done in order to speed up the process?’”

“We came to Canada because we thought that the Canadian immigration system was transparent, tolerant and equal,” Mr. Shagambayev said. “This really made us feel like we’re not needed in Canada, not welcomed, like nobody wants us here, even though there are all these shiny slogans about how we need immigration to fuel our work force and economy.”

“But I love this country anyway, because every time I leave Canada and come back, I feel like I’m home.”

Source: Canada’s immigration system is overwhelmed with information requests. Ottawa was warned – but did nothing

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Express immigration programs overstaffed: budget watchdog

2023/03/09 Leave a comment

Backlogs yet…:

Three programs designed to get skilled immigrants settled in Canada faster have more staff than needed to meet the government’s goals, according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer released Tuesday.

The report looked at three “express entry” programs — the Federal Skilled Worker Program, the Canadian Experience Class and the Federal Skilled Trades Program — and the government’s target of processing 80 per cent of applications to the programs within six months. Quebec does not participate in the three programs.

“Based on our analysis, current staffing levels at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) are expected to be more than sufficient to meet the processing time goal for the next five years,” Yves Giroux, the parliamentary budget officer, said in a news release.

Source: Express immigration programs overstaffed: budget watchdog

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Clarkson: If Canada loses its citizenship ceremonies, we risk losing ourselves

2023/03/06 Leave a comment

Calls out the efforts by the government and IRCC to diminish the value and meaningfulness of citizenship and highlights their lack of understanding of the fundamental meaning and belonging of ceremonies (disclosure I am providing citizenship and related data to the ICC).

To date, op-eds from the left (Toronto Star), centre (Globe) and right (National Post). Tenor of reader comments is against the proposed change but how many will submit written comments through the Gazette process and will the government listen.

And will either the NDP or CPC deem it important enough issue to raise given the understandable fixation on the government’s handling (or mishandling) of Chinese government foreign interference allegations:

One of the most wonderful things about becoming a Canadian is the citizenship ceremony.

There, new citizens are surrounded by a little crowd of other people who want to become Canadian too. It might be held in a federal citizenship office or in some other location that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has found that can accommodate people, though at the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, we try to hold our citizenship ceremonies in public spaces: libraries, city halls, university campuses, places we hope these new citizens will return to. Always, there is incredible joy – the kind that comes with recognizing that something special is happening. Wearing a head scarf or a beard, or an embroidered vest in brilliant colours, these about-to-become citizens know that they are doing something meaningful.

When I became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1992, I was told that I would be able to preside over these ceremonies in the way a citizenship judge does. I was delighted by the idea: For my family and me, who arrived as stateless refugees during the Second World War, the precious gift of Canadian citizenship that we received in 1949 was something we cherished and celebrated.

The first ceremony over which I presided was overwhelming: there was such excitement and warmth among people of different backgrounds – even though the whole thing was taking place at the Metropolitan Toronto Police headquarters!

When my husband John Ralston Saul and I founded the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, one of the first things we wanted to do was to have special ceremonies to acknowledge how important this moment is in people’s lives. For six years, as Governor-General, I presided over citizenship ceremonies, and invited people who already had Canadian citizenship to come specifically to meet the new citizens, to sit at roundtables with them and have discussions before the formal ceremony. Everyone shared coffee and doughnuts afterward. It wasn’t elaborate, but it was congenial and hospitable.

When I left Rideau Hall, I decided that this would be a feature of the institute, and for 16 years we carried this on with the wisdom and guidance of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. With their help, we have ceremonies in which we have Indigenous speakers and music, and roundtables where people can share their experiences of Canada up to that point.

It’s not a big deal. But it is important. And everyone who is sworn in across the country as citizens recognizes that the others around them are people who, like them, have taken the risk of leaving their own country with the courage to come and make a new life in Canada.

We can’t overstate the significance of being able to be around each other when we take our citizenship vows, or of new citizens receiving the formal and yet warm welcome they get from professional and excellent Immigration officials, who leave no misunderstanding as to what a citizen is and how a citizen can contribute to their country. The citizenship judges, whether they are federal appointees or members of the Order of Canada, always take the ceremonies to heart, and it is so moving to see people from so many different countries at each ceremony joining together and saying that they will become part of Canada.

Now, there are reports that in order to get rid of an administrative backlog, new citizens will be given the option to take their oath online, rather than in a physical ceremony. Frankly, I’m horrified by this. I believe that people want ceremonies to mark important passages in their lives. I think welcoming people in person is the least we can do as a country. I feel that the people who work at the ministry understand that, and that they do put a human face on it as much as they can.

The idea that Canada, which is perhaps the most successful immigrant nation in the world, would resort to a machine-oriented way of saying that you are now a citizen, is egregious. In 2001, on my state visit to Germany as Governor-General, then-president Johannes Rau told me how deeply impressed he was that we inducted people into citizenship personally. He lamented the fact that Germany generally sent out citizenships by some form of registered mail.

I can’t help feeling very emotional when I talk about this, because I do believe that ceremonies are important stages of every human being’s life. There is a reason why we have birthday parties, for instance, or why co-workers often share a cake when someone leaves for another job. There is a reason why people go to city hall or to a religious institution to bring meaning to their marriage. There is humanity in marking milestones in each other’s company; it is the mark of a civilized society. And Canada should always think of itself as a society which not only knows how to welcome people, but shows that a personal welcome is only the beginning of belonging.

Adrienne Clarkson was Canada’s 26th Governor-General and co-founder of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

Source: If Canada loses its citizenship ceremonies, we risk losing ourselves

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Yuan Yi Zhu: Canadian citizenship is embarrassingly cheap and online oath makes it cheaper

2023/03/06 Leave a comment

Apart from the unnecessary snark and playing to the gallery if the comments on Zhu’s article are any guide, he nails the substance of this misguided change. But hopefully he and others will take the time to file their objections to the proposal through the Canada Gazette process (I will share my input in a future post):
Newly published figures by Statistics Canada revealed that fewer than half of permanent residents now take Canadian citizenship within 10 years, a 40 per cent decline over two decades.
Cue soul-searching among the usual Ottawa think tankers, wondering why the world’s denizens no longer wanted to be on “Team Canada.” Why did so many recent immigrants, arriving in record numbers, refuse the citizenship we hand to them practically for free and after as little as three years’ residence, or 1,095 days spent within the country out of the last five years?

Source: Yuan Yi Zhu: Canadian citizenship is embarrassingly cheap and online oath makes it cheaper

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In Niagara Falls, Roxham Road asylum seekers find less space and more strife as tourist season nears

2023/03/06 Leave a comment

Not all that surprising:

It had been a long time since Marie Saintil had last been to church, when she found herself at the pulpit of the Faith Tabernacle in Welland, Ont., on a recent Sunday evening.

“Est-ce que tout le monde parle Créole?” she asked the small Haitian congregation, a half dozen or so of whom had been shuttled to the service in their Sunday best from the various hotels in nearby Niagara Falls where they are living. The congregation nods in unison – yes, they all speak Créole.

Ms. Saintil, a lawyer of Haitian background herself, was there that evening to deliver not a sermon, but a primer on the refugee claims process.

When she took a job with the Niagara Community Legal Clinic in January, she was looking for a change of pace after two decades of practising immigration law in Toronto. Instead, she has found herself in the throes of a migration crisis, with thousands of asylum seekers unexpectedly placed in a tourist town that is not equipped to absorb them, transferred by the federal government from Quebec after crossing at Roxham Road.

More than 2,841 asylum seekers have been transferred to Niagara Falls by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada since last June, spread across more than 1,400 hotel rooms in the city after being shuttled on from their arrival in Quebec.

Another 702 have been placed in Ottawa, 618 in Windsor, and 1,396 in Cornwall, according to the IRCC. They began transfers to Atlantic provinces at the end of last month, with 63 so far transferred to Halifax and 30 people transferred to Fredericton.

But nine months in – as understaffed settlement and social services scramble to support the newcomers, and with as many as one in 12 hotel rooms occupied as the city’s tourism season looms – tensions are starting to build.

“These people are taken from Roxham Road in Quebec, and they’re put into a bus, and they’re dumped. And the word is dumped – they’re dumped here,” Ms. Saintil said.

“And now they’re being told, you’re not really wanted because we have tourists coming … It was fine to have them here during the slow season, in the wintertime, but now that the tourists are coming, you’re not wanted.”

Ms. Saintil cannot represent them, she told the congregants at the church, as she handed out information packets and business cards. This has not been her clinic’s mandate, but she feels compelled to help given how few lawyers in the area do this work.

The migrants did not choose Niagara Falls. They ended up here after being repeatedly shuffled along by American and then Canadian authorities – perpetually treated as someone else’s problem. Regardless of where their journeys began, these migrants have often crossed several borders before arriving in Canadain an effort to flee violence, persecution and poverty – and have faced hostility along the way.

At the Mexico-U.S. border, thousands of people are crossing each day. And once in the United States, they have faced increasing hostility, including from political leaders in southern states such as Texas and Florida, whose Republican governors have transported thousands of asylum seekers to places such as New York, Washington and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

In New York, Democratic politicians have responded to an influx of migrants by offering one-way tickets to Plattsburgh, N.Y., a short distance from the Canadian border at Roxham Road.

Under the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S., asylum seekers must file their claims in whichever country they arrive in first, which means they will be turned back if they attempt to get into Canada at official border crossings. Because that agreement covers only official border points, crossings at the unofficial Roxham Road entry have risen sharply.

Now in Canada, the migrants are finding themselves unwelcome in Quebec, too. With the numbers at Roxham Road continuing to rise – close to 40,000 migrants entered Canada there last year – Quebec’s Premier François Legault has protested the “strain” the influx has put on his province’s social services and urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to shut it down, or send them elsewhere.

“Everybody is sending the ball to somebody else,” Ms. Saintil said. “It’s a blame game.”

With a population of 95,000 people, Niagara Falls depends heavily on tourism and is known as much for the massive falls that straddle an international border as it is for the garishness of its main drag, lined with haunted houses and wax museums. The city has upwards of 16,000 hotel rooms, Mayor Jim Diodati said, and at first the IRCC contracts seemed like welcome news for hotels that have been struggling after three years in a pandemic.

“We’ve got lots of rooms, we’ll do our part and help out as much as we can – that’s kind of the attitude as it started,” he said. But as the numbers began to grow, he said the mood has shifted. “They went from 87 to 300, to 687, to 1,500 … And then we were told 1,700 and 2,000 were the next steps,” he said. “And, you know, we weren’t really sure how much we can handle, and at what point it would become disruptive, because we’ve never been through anything like this before.”

After a video call with Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, and his staff last month, the mayor said he still doesn’t know how long the hotel rooms are booked for. He said he’s concerned about the impact on the coming tourism season, which he describes as the “the goose that lays the golden eggs here.”

“A tourist is going to spend money in restaurants, the attractions, the casinos, the wineries … whereas these folks are just staying in the rooms,” he said. “A lot of people are counting on it to feed their families and pay their mortgages and pay their rents. So we’re asking, ‘What’s the plan?’ ”

IRCC spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald wouldn’t provide a timeline on how long the hotel rooms have been leased, citing confidentiality. In an e-mail, he said the department takes into account availability, cost, transportation and access to support services.

Mr. Diodati said he was told numbers were likely to peak in the coming weeks, as they began to transfer people to other areas, including the Atlantic provinces. But in the meantime, he warns the mood of the town has begun to shift. “Most conversations that people have with me start off with ‘I don’t want to be insensitive, and I’m not complaining … but where are we going with this?’ ” he said. “And we’re trying to get answers.” The mayor said he has asked the federal government for more money to help the city and local organizations keep up with demand. IRCC said in a statement that it was working with the local government to ensure they are prepared and to respond any concerns.

On a Friday evening almost one week after the mayor’s meeting with the immigration minister, the lobby of the Ramada hotel on Lundy’s Lane was crammed with 100 or so people lined up for dinner.

This type of scene, Ms. Saintil believes, is the real unspoken concern. “It just doesn’t look good to see all these refugee claimants in the hotels. That’s what it is,” she said. “It doesn’t look good in pictures with American tourists.”

On a frigid Sunday afternoon, Henry Carmona and a group of fellow Venezuelan migrants headed down from their hotel to take in the icy view of the falls.

The economic collapse and rise of political violence in Venezuela have led to one of the largest displacement crises in the world. It is a mass exodus that has sent a quarter of the country’s population – more than seven million people – fleeing to neighbouring Colombia and then onward.

It took these men years to get here. They each show off photos of the families they had to leave behind because of the dangerous nature of their journeys.

Truck drivers by trade, the men are eager to get their work permits, learn English and begin to find work. But they landed in Niagara only a few days earlier, bused in from Quebec after their arrival at Roxham Road.

They have appreciated their treatment in Canada so far, they said. They laughed as they took in the various gimmicky attractions on Clifton Hill. Next door to the Museum of the Stars, a stiff-moving dinosaur head called out to them from the Looney Tunes-esque Bone Blaster Shootin’ Gallery.

And though they’d expected to be in Quebec, they are content in Niagara for now; whenever their work permits are ready, they plan to go where the work is. Other asylum seekers who spoke with The Globe and Mail, some from Colombia and others from Haiti, said the same.

At the YMCA of Niagara, Deanna D’Elia, manager of employment and immigrant services, has scrambled to move some part-time workers to full-time in an effort to address the spiralling need.

Of their 65-member team, 25 or so are focused specifically on settlement. Others work on helping them find employment, though a major part of that process depends on work permits – which, given the backlog, can take many months or even years to be issued.

“Individuals and families have come to Canada to seek a better life and they are eager to work,” Ms. D’Elia said. In the meantime, many must rely on social assistance, which in today’s rental market can barely cover a room in the city. It’s a situation that she says has “amplified” discussions about the housing crisis, both regionally and across the province and country.

It’s a pressure that is being felt in social services across the region, which were under pressure even before the asylum seekers arrived.

On a recent Friday morning, Pam Sharp and her team at Project SHARE were preparing for a busy day at the largest food bank in Niagara Falls. They’d had to close the day before for an ice storm, and knew it was likely to be busier as a result.

Demand in the community was already very high. In addition to the food bank, they also provide homelessness prevention supports and other services, and served the equivalent of one in 10 residents last year, she said.

They see, on average, 100 families a day, and the infusion of 3,000 new vulnerable people is stretching them to their limits. Both the regional and city council have declared a state of emergency on homelessness, mental health and opioid addiction.

Ms. Sharp has noticed more and more asylum seekers coming in – for example, of the 157 families they served one day this week, 60 identified as asylum seekers –and the team has on occasion done outreach at the hotels directly.

“We want to make sure that anyone coming into our city is able to meet their basic needs,” she says.

Janet Medume, executive director of the Welland Heritage Council and Multicultural Centre, which is leading the local settlement efforts. said they weren’t told in advance about the asylum seekers’ arrivals but began to hear word through community networks last summer. Since then, more than 20 community organizations have banded together to develop a strategy, but she said they need both funding and staffing boosts from all levels of government to keep up.

“Let’s inject more resources so we can focus on ensuring individuals get the help they need, and hopefully get employment quick enough, so we can get them out of there as soon as possible,” she said. “Give us those resources and we’ll be okay.”

At the church Sunday evening, Ms. Saintil lingered after the service, passing out information pamphlets and business cards. She wore a sad smile as she watched a trio of siblings – ages 8, 7 and 1 – playing in the foyer. The older two, sisters, showed off cartwheels and boasted about their favourite school subjects.

She urged their father to get them scarves for the cold weather, and he nodded enthusiastically. They’ve been here eight months in a hotel, Ms. Saintil said, after they waved goodbye. The parents were only recently able to meet with a lawyer for the first time.

“Everybody’s doing their best,” she said. “But if they’re hoping this is not going to be a crisis in a month or two, they have to start acting now.”

Source: In Niagara Falls, Roxham Road asylum seekers find less space and more strife as tourist season nears

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