The Canadian government continues to monitor the immigration services industry. A Citizenship and Immigration Commission summoned by the Parliament has presented a report critically analyzing the activities of immigration consultants.

In 2004, as a response to abundant criticism of the industry, the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants (CSIC) was created in an attempt to regulate the consultants. However, the improvement was not significant enough; according to the Commission, thousands of people fall victims of fraud every year. At this time in Canada, there are approximately six thousand individuals referring to themselves as immigration consultants, while only about a thousand of them are members of the professional organization. Just as before, anyone regardless of having appropriate education or a license, can offer immigration services, thus represent clients to the immigration authorities.

Certainly, there are many honest and hardworking consultants; however, it is clear that under present conditions the system is far from being perfect and is vulnerable to illegal activity, thus provoking appropriate criticism. Incidentally, government activities directed at protecting the rights of Canadians and potential immigrants can hardly be called adequate. Lack of this adequacy ends up costing the victims large sums of money or what is worse, leads to broken lives and shattered hopes. In many other cases the government demonstrates far more decisiveness in maintaining order.

There is one more side to the problem: services offered by immigration lawyers are often too expensive, forcing people to turn to the help of immigration consultant. As for the clientele, they are in abundance; according to the “Toronto Star”, there are at least 80,000 illegal immigrants living in Toronto (not taking into account the rest of the country). The Citizenship and Immigration Commission strongly recommends shutting down the existing association of immigration consultants and replacing it with a new organization capable of maintaining order and helping immigrants and refugees avoid being defrauded. Presumably, membership in the new organization will be mandatory, which means that consultants would have to prove their sufficient knowledge and experience.

The conservative party has yet again gained support of the liberal opposition on an issue the parties were not able to agree upon in the past. This time the issue is immigration reform. Liberals are afraid of provoking an untimely election and are compelled to agree with proposals of the Harper government, in spite of publicly condemning them.

The immigration reform empowers the Minister of Immigration to be more selective and give preference to certain categories of immigrants as well as issue instruction on specific cases. Opponents of this bill claim that these changes would lead to discriminative practices. It is interesting to note that the opposition does not mention the interests of Canada in light of these changes. Meanwhile, the main idea behind the reform is allowing the Minister of Immigration to select classes of immigrants that correspond with the needs of the country. It is not surprising that there is a degree of apprehension based on increased authority of the Minister; if the Minister of Immigration is able to reduce certain categories of immigrants that become an unnecessary burden to the economy but are at the same time of interest to some political parties then those political parties will lose the support of corresponding electorate. The consequences of this reform will be clear in the future.

Recently, Statistics Canada published a report stating that success of new immigrants is affected by a multitude of factors; country of origin is listed as one of the more significant factors. It is interesting to note that this statement is not supported by concrete data that enables the reader to determine which countries bear more adaptable and successful immigrants and why. For now these questions remain unanswered.