Immigration judges failing new requirements

More than half of the immigration judges applying to review refugee claims in Canada in 2012 are not qualified to do the job, a CBC investigation has found.

That’s because more than half of them failed to meet new criteria that will be a requirement of the role after it undergoes legislative changes.

The immigration system in Canada is currently in the process of being amended by Bill C-11.

The bill, which will be introduced next June, will replace the position of board members, or refugee judge, with a new title, but the job will remain more or less the same.

All of the current board members were required to go through an application process if they were interested in the new posts.

According to documents obtained by the CBC under the Access to Information and Privacy Act, the majority didn’t pass the testing, abandoned the process or were screened out.

Of the 63 Immigration and Refugee Board judges currently hearing refugee claimant's files, 32 don't meet criteria for the same job under Bill C-11.

Twenty-four of the applicants were eliminated after multiple choice and written exams. Twelve more withdrew their application or failed to submit the exam. One was screened out and seven more eliminated after interviews.

That leaves the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) with 10 candidates who had passed the interview and nine who were waiting for an interview to be scheduled, as of Nov. 4, the most up to date information available.

The IRB would not grant an interview and refused to confirm how many candidates it was left with.

In an emailed statement, the board said it is launching a new process, “ to ensure we have enough qualified candidates to create staffing pools to fill the positions we need in order to implement the Balanced Refugee Reform Act.”

Dan Bohbot, president of Quebec's Immigration Lawyers Association, said those results are cause for significant concern when it comes to the credibility of those making decisions at the IRB.

Bohbot said a judge's rejection of a refugee claim often means a claimant is sent back to life-threatening situations in their home countries.

“It means [if] the person having his case decided by a possibly incompetent board member then he will not have a justice done and that's why I think there's problem now at the IRB,” he said.

Bohbot is now asking that judges suspend clients' files until Bill C-11 comes into effect, arguing he doesn't have confidence they've passed the exam.

So far, no judge has agreed.

Canada accused of still failing its poor

It's been more than 20 years since the House of Commons unanimously resolved to end child poverty by the year 2000. But a national advocacy group says it's shocked by how little progress has been made.

The economy has more than doubled in size since that 1989 resolution, but the incomes of the poorest families in Canada have stagnated, Campaign 2000 says in its 20th annual report card on child and family poverty released Wednesday.

"Every year I am shocked by the lack of progress made in poverty eradication," said Laurel Rothman, national co-ordinator of Campaign 2000. "The gap between rich and poor families has continued to widen, and low-income and average-income families are left struggling to keep up."

The group says 639,000 children still live in poverty in Canada — one in every 10 children. Among aboriginal children, the rate is one in four. Above-average poverty rates are also seen among children of immigrants and among children with a disability, as a parent frequently has to stay home to look after the child.

That's not to say there has been no progress in the fight against poverty. The rate of child and family poverty was 9.5 per cent in 2009, down from 11.9 per cent in 1989. But Campaign 2000 calls that 20-year change "strikingly small" given the growth in the Canadian economy since then.

Nationally, the group is calling for a federal minimum wage of $11 an hour. Currently, there is no federal minimum wage — provincial minimum wages range from $9 to $10.25 hourly. Only in Nunavut is the minimum wage $11.

But it says a higher minimum wage by itself will not close the gap. It also recommends that the child benefit for low-income families be boosted to $5,400 per child (the current maximum is $3,485).

Campaign 2000 refers to what it calls "cautious optimism" in describing some provincial efforts to tackle child and family poverty.

Quebec, for instance, has adopted poverty reduction strategies that have seen the province's poverty rate plunge from 16.1 per cent in 2000 to 7.7 per cent in 2009. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the poverty rate dove from 17.9 per cent to 9.3 per cent over the same period.

Newfoundland is the only province that provides enough social assistance for a single parent with one child to live above the poverty line. In every other province, welfare rates keep a single parent with one child living in poverty — sometimes just below the poverty line, but sometimes as much as $5,000 below the low-income cut-off mark.

Even having a full-time job is no guarantee of escaping poverty. Figures show that one in three low-income children lives in a family where at least one parent works full-time year-round. One in four workers in Canada was in a low-wage job in 2010 — one that pays less than $13.32 an hour.

The group calls for more government attention to child care, noting that fewer than one in five children has access to a regulated child-care space.

It also wants to see a national housing strategy to address the 750,000 children under the age of 15 who live in housing that, in its words, is either "unaffordable, substandard, overcrowded or all three."

The Campaign 2000 report also noted that the federal Conservatives' decision last year to make the long-form census voluntary will make the group's job more difficult.

"Census data is the only reliable source of information on poverty rates with demographic breakdowns," it says. "Until the long-form census or a similarly reliable data source is introduced, we will not be able to track child poverty rates among selected social groups for 2010 or after."