Three years after Ottawa launched a new regulatory body to police the immigration consultant industry, critics say there are as many illegal “ghost” consultants as ever preying on would-be immigrants.
“It is still a Wild West,” says Francisco Rico-Martinez, co-director of Toronto’s FCJ Refugee Centre. “The ghosts still operate out there. People still fall victim to them.”
Experts say that despite stiffer new penalties for those who operate without licences or oversight, unscrupulous consultants continue to take advantage of refugee claimants and immigration applicants struggling to navigate Canada’s confusing and ever-changing system.
A few of these ghost consultants, who sometimes counsel clients to commit fraud, have been arrested and charged under the new laws, which provide for up to five years in jail and $100,000 in fines.
Rico-Martinez complains that when complaints are made to the Burlington-based Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council (ICCRC), it has no power to police ghost consultants.
Instead, it’s up to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to investigate.
“When you complain to the Canada Border Services Agency,” Rico-Martinez continues, “they don’t even respond. Little has changed. Nobody really does anything about these ghost consultants. That’s why they are still operating.”
While the immigration department and ICCRC do caution the public against the use of unauthorized consultants on their websites, Rico-Martinez says, it’s still a “buyer beware” scenario.
Rico-Martinez served as a community member on the board of the old consultants’ regulator, which was probed in the Star’s 2007 investigative series Lost in Migration. The federal government replaced it in June 2011 with the ICCRC. Migrants’ advocates, lawyers and regulated consultants have praised the new body for its better transparency and governance of the sector.
However, everyone — including the council’s own head — concedes it has limitations when it comes to going after ghost consultants.
“We have no authority to take any action against non-members,” says ICCRC chief executive officer and president Bob Brack, who spent three decades working for Citizenship and Immigration, including stints at seven visa posts. “All we can do is accept the complaints and pass them on to CBSA. We do everything we can, but we are a small organization of 25 staff.”
Citizenship and Immigration Canada said in a statement that the department takes all immigration fraud very seriously and has cracked down on crooked consultants by making it an offence for anyone other than an accredited immigration representative to offer immigration services at a fee.
Ghost consultants charge anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, sometimes imposing fees higher than what lawyers demand for the same service.
CBSA spokesperson Vanessa Barrasa says the agency has more than 200 criminal investigators across the country. Over the past six years, the CBSA has received 741 complaints against both licensed and unlicensed immigration consultants and referred 30 cases to prosecutors. It’s not known how many were actually charged and convicted, but Barrasa said eight cases are still before courts.
Since its inception, the ICCRC has received more complaints against ghost operators than its licensed members (571 versus 559). Complaints against unregulated consultants keep growing, from 190 in 2012 to 381 last year.
Toronto lawyer Mario Bellissimo, a former chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration section, says the Conservative government’s rapid changes to the immigration and refugee system have helped fuel the rise of fly-by-night immigration advisers.
“These changes the government embarked upon are breeding grounds for unscrupulous consultants. Those changes are made with little notice and are retroactive. (Applicants) who were eligible are no longer eligible overnight.
“It weakens the integrity of the system. People just don’t know who to trust.”
Marsha Rose Marie Tomlin, 35, arrived in Nova Scotia from Jamaica under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program in 2008, but quit her job two months later and moved to Brampton. She has lived under the radar in Canada ever since.
In late 2013, Tomlin told the Star, a friend introduced her to an immigration consultant named Cheryl Smith who said she could help her obtain legal status here.
According to Tomlin’s April 4 complaint to the ICCRC, Smith gave her a list of documents titled “Humanitarian & Compassionate In-Canada Application for Landing” the first time they met last year and told her there would be a fee of $4,500.
On her subsequent meetings with Smith, on Dec.17, 2013, and Feb. 2, 2014, Tomlin paid Smith a total of $3,050, she says. However, a few weeks after their last meeting, the complaint alleges, Smith contacted Tomlin and said she had heard back from Immigration and that there was a warrant out for Tomlin’s arrest and Smith could no longer help her.
The CBSA told the Star that it had, in fact, issued a warrant for Tomlin on June 18, 2012, because she was deemed to be “an overstay.”
Tomlin says she didn’t know that only a member of the ICCRC or a licensed lawyer could offer immigration advice and services for a fee. She filed a similar complaint to the Law Society of Upper Canada saying Smith wasn’t licensed as a paralegal.
Both regulators confirmed with the Star that they have no registered member under the name Cheryl Smith.
In her complaint, Tomlin submitted Smith’s business card. It used the name “MAVAACS IMMIGRATION & PARALEGAL SERVICES” and said it specialized in all aspects of “immigration and other social issues,” listing an address on Dundas St. W. in Etobicoke.
Licensed immigration consultant Marva Yvonne Kollar helped Tomlin file the complaint with the authorities after the two met at a Pentecostal church. Kollar says she checked with ICCRC and the law society and found out Smith was neither a licensed consultant nor paralegal.
Smith did not respond to the Star’s repeated requests by phone and in writing for comment. But through her lawyer, Suvendu Goswami, she said she was not interested in speaking with the media.
“As her lawyer, I have no comments to offer you as well,” Goswami wrote in an email to the Star. “Please refrain from pursuing my said client henceforth. I sincerely hope that you would respect my client’s privacy and stop bothering her.”
Tomlin’s complaint to the ICCRC was forwarded to the Canada Border Services Agency, but her supporters received no response as to whether it had received the complaint or launched an investigation.
“This is frustrating for everyone,” says Kollar, an immigration consultant for more than 10 years. “There was the Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, but clearly it is not enforced if somebody openly has an office to give immigration advice. And the buck stops at CBSA.”
In the past year, the CBSA and police have made three high-profile arrests in Toronto, Ottawa and Edmonton for fraud under both immigration and criminal laws.
In a Toronto police operation dubbed “False Angel,” Angelina Codina of Codina International Consultants was arrested in May and faces seven counts of fraud and five charges under the Immigration Act. She is accused of passing as an immigration lawyer who “did not render any services beyond collecting fees.”
In June, an Ottawa judge handed out a one-year jail sentence and three years’ probation to Sergiy Gedeonov for offering immigration services at a fee without authorization — a decision hailed by the consulting industry.
In August, Janet Chen Macaulay of Edmonton was charged with four counts of fraud for acting as an unlicensed immigration consultant representing corporate and individual clients on up to 190 work permit applications.
As for the Smith case, the CBSA told the Star it cannot confirm or deny whether she is under investigation.
“Immigration fraud is a criminal offence in Canada and damages the integrity of our immigration system,” said CBSA spokesperson Barrasa.
“The CBSA takes this issue very seriously and works closely with its partners to identify, investigate and prosecute those engaging in immigration fraud to the full extent of the law. This includes investigating and prosecuting immigration consultants.”
While immigration officials are now more vigilant in ensuring applicants use authorized consultants to avoid dealing with unlicensed ones, leading refugee lawyer Lorne Waldman, president of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, says the key to stop the ghosts is enhanced enforcement — which has worked in other areas of immigration.
He cites Ottawa’s crackdown on marriage fraud, whereby all spousal sponsorship applications are put under the microscope to the extent even legitimate couples face extra scrutiny and long processing times, and are sometimes rejected.
“The new law improves the governance of the regulator (ICCRC); nobody disagrees. But you don’t hear crooked consultants mentioned by the government anymore.
“Why would the government care about ghost consultants’ victims, who are either outside of Canada or on their way out of Canada?”
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