Is the Canadian administration collapsing under the weight of its own carelessness? In the shadow of the passport crisis and the long delays bemoaned by unfortunate employment insurance recipients, other crises — visa crises, study permits for foreign students and work permits for foreign workers — are raging. The figures and testimonials compiled by The duty these last few days show that all the indicators are red. A very dark red.
The Orchester de la francophonie had to resolve to mourn several summer interns, for lack of visas obtained in time. A first since the academy opened up to the world in 2009. The International Festival Nuits d’Afrique saw the door close in the face of its headliner. In recent weeks, Nigerian pop star Yemi Alade’s passport has taken her to Britain, France and Belgium. Not here, we were too afraid that she and her orchestra would take root in the country.
In the cultural milieu, we are familiar with this type of pitfalls, which have continued to multiply, especially for festivals, the lifeblood and global calling card of local culture. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has a Special Events Unit that organizations have painfully learned to work with. She would have even developed a certain expertise, joke half-fig, half-grape, certain programmers.
But like the Canadian administration, the famous Unit is experiencing “longer delays than usual,” candidly admits IRCC. With the effect that many international guests of the world congress on agroforestry at Laval University, mostly Africans, could not make the trip to Quebec. We now fear the same thing for the arrival of hundreds of African specialists at an international conference on AIDS which will open on Friday in Montreal. A common point between these failures in series? The majority of failed travelers come from Africa, or from certain areas of South America or Asia.
For a country that wraps itself in the virtues of an all-out multiculturalism, this reluctance is surprising. It looks like a discriminatory system. A compilation of To have to shows that Canada takes up to five months to process an application in some countries. Never seen. The disparities by country are huge, with obvious peaks in the Middle East and Africa. If you wait between 10 and 20 days for your visa in the United Kingdom or Suriname, at the other end of the spectrum, Saudi Arabia wins the prize for the worst delays with 219 days of waiting. Benin follows with 177 days.
IRCC denies any bias: applications would be reviewed in a “uniform way”, and with “the same criteria”. A similar exercise conducted by The duty to dissect the delays encountered by foreign workers in obtaining a work permit, however, exposes a distribution in all respects similar to that of visas, with dizzying peaks of more than a year in certain regions of the world. On the ground, employers are tearing their hair out, to the point of sometimes giving up on countries with the worst records. Too long, too uncertain, too impoverishing.
It is appalling how blind the Canadian machine is to its own turpitude. No, she doesn’t see the imbalance that our maps allow you to see at a glance. Worse, it deludes itself by publishing estimated processing times that sometimes have nothing to do with reality. Travelers who waited for their passports have already starred in this bad movie. This is also the case for foreign students awaiting a study permit. IRCC rates their treatment at 12 weeks. The dutyshowed this weekend that dozens of French-speaking African students admitted to Canadian universities have been waiting for their precious sesame for many months, some for more than a year.
The Trudeau government admits that its services are overloaded, but it refuses the idea that they are made dysfunctional. He prefers to take refuge behind the convenient pandemic screen. Sclerosing for all organizations, COVID-19 has certainly put sand in the gears. But this gear, we already knew it was pretty badly oiled. In 2017, a study by the World Economic Forum placed Canada 120e out of 136 countries on visas, seeing its visa policies as one of the most convoluted and opaque in the world. In 2019? 125e out of 139.
With the pandemic, this annual study was put on hold, but we can bet that with the delays we are experiencing this year, Canada could not improve its score. Border control is legitimate, but there is a way. This is not the first time that IRCC has been reminded to be more transparent and, above all, fairer. By dint of postponing this project, Canada is playing its reputation.