They receive in their office cases in very bad shape, even desperate. They do triage, like in the emergency room, and sometimes save lives. Who are they ? Health professionals? No. Constituency office assistants.
“People come into our office with three bullets in their heads and we have to give them mouth-to-mouth in hopes of saving them. Carolina Rivera, constituency assistant in the office of New Democratic Party MP Alexandre Boulerice, has no trouble using the metaphor of emergency care to describe her job. “The MP’s office is like the last chance office,” she says.
In this office in the federal riding of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, 90% of files deal with immigration, estimates Ms.me Rivera, who has already practiced as a lawyer in this field. And the trend is up. “It has increased, especially for 2-3 years, with the pandemic. »
It is in this context that researchers from Université Laval became interested in the “crucial, but little-known role” that constituency assistants play in relation to immigration-related problems.
Because this essential work that they carry out in the shadow of the federal deputies is increasingly undermined, has found a study which comes out today, entitled “The emergency rooms of immigration. The Role of Constituency Offices and Assistants in Canada” and obtained by The duty.
The report, unpublished, is strong: 117 constituency offices out of the 338 in total responded to an online survey, and 31 then agreed to participate in semi-structured interviews. Respondents come from offices representing all parties, spread across all provinces, in both urban and rural settings.
One of the main findings of this survey carried out during the pandemic is that constituency assistants have become indispensable when it comes to resolving an immigration-related situation. Even more in recent years, as Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has closed some points of service and started a digital shift.
Act urgently, with empathy
Over the course of the interviews, the metaphor of the emergency room was widely imposed and came from the assistants themselves, specifies Professor Danièle Bélanger, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Global Migration Dynamics. “They see themselves as immigration emergency physicians, both administratively and emotionally. They listen and solve problems. »
And when faced with a person awaiting removal or about to lose their status, intervention must be rapid and urgent. “For example, we may be called upon to build a case to convince a minister not to expel a person, but the removal order must be less than 48 hours from being executed,” explains Claudine Boucher, constituency assistant for the MNA for Louis-Hébert, the Liberal Joël Lightbound. Sometimes it’s a family member who’s stuck overseas and in danger. You need an emergency travel document, you have to react quickly. »
People walk into our office with three bullets in their heads and we have to give them mouth-to-mouth, hoping to save them.
This extraordinary job, which several assistants say they learned “on the job”, requires undeniable human qualities. According to the study, more than 80% of the assistants surveyed cited empathy, listening and the ability to solve problems as the most important qualities for practicing the profession.
“To give you an idea, we buy Kleenex at Costco because everyone is crying in our offices, illustrates Carolina Rivera. Once you’ve heard a person’s life story, you can’t let go of their case. This person touched you, she gave you an incredible lesson in resilience. You have to win. »
An “opaque” system
At the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, the successive crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine monopolized a large part of the staff of the Ministerial Center for deputies and senators, leaving a skeletal team in place. In the fall of 2022, in order to make the service more efficient, a new system was implemented, which now requires constituency assistants to make an appointment online and then be called back by an immigration officer. But this new system would now allocate an average of only 30 minutes per week per MP’s office.
“Everyone struggles to speak to an agent. This has greatly reduced our ability to follow the files, notes Claudine Boucher. Before, you could just pick up the phone and call. It often happened to me to settle matters on the spot, while the person was in my office. But we can’t do that anymore. »
The digital shift of IRCC, which increasingly uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make decisions on files, has further bogged down the machine, believes Mme Butcher. Access to information requests made by his colleague revealed a link between the increasing use of AI and the increase in the number of requests, in particular to have errors corrected. “We found ourselves faced with more and more aberrations, such as grounds for refusal on the pretext that the job prospects were not good in the country of origin, but… it was a child of 7 years ! »
At the end of her study, Danièle Bélanger observes that constituency offices are so important that they have become “extensions” of IRCC. “Across Canada, it’s as if we had 338 IRCC regional offices,” says the professor. Constituency offices claim that they generally know the population they serve well and have developed services that, for example, allow them to communicate in several languages, which IRCC cannot do.
Nevertheless, recourse to deputies should only be in exceptional cases. “But it’s become the number one door people knock on. The federal government must ask itself questions,” she concluded.