Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is set to introduce a new law that will make it a criminal offence for anyone to offer immigration services without being a registered consultant.

The Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, to be unveiled in Parliament Tuesday, will allow law enforcement authorities to lay criminal charges against the so-called “ghost consultants,” who prey on vulnerable to-be migrants but are off the officials’ radar, the Star has learned.

Such individuals could face a $50,000 fine and a two-year jail term upon conviction.

The changes come two years after a Star investigative series that exposed the problem of unscrupulous immigration consultants who have continued to take advantage of the law’s loopholes despite a new regulatory body Ottawa established in 2004 to weed out these operations.

“The new legislation will crack down crooked consultants who are exploiting tens of thousands of people who dream of coming to this country,” one source told the Star. “This has created an entire industry of underground ghost consultants who offer people fraudulent advice and counterfeit documents and never fulfill their promises — this has obviously been a long-standing problem.”

Examples of consultants taking advantage of the system include charging applicants for refugee claims when they’re not real refugees or taking applicants’ money without completing the necessary paperwork.

Currently, RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency officers can only go after those unauthorized individuals whose names appear in immigration or refugee applications as the legal representatives — but ghost consultants never identify themselves in any official document.

Often, immigrant and refugee applicants have to bear the consequences of such frauds and misrepresentation, seeing their cases unnecessarily rejected and their dreams shattered.

The criminalization of unauthorized consultants was one of the key recommendations put forward by the all-party parliamentary citizenship and immigration standing committee, which conducted a nation-wide consultation in 2008 to revamp the consultants’ regulatory system after the Star investigation.

The Star series found that the consultants’ regulator, the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants, only has the authority to regulate its 1,500 members but was itself engulfed in and consumed with internal management issues — pushing some frustrated consultants to practise underground. It’s not yet known if the government will seek an overhaul of the regulatory body.

Another source told the Star that the proposed legislation will allow improved information-sharing among enforcement authorities and the regulator “on individuals providing unethical or unprofessional representation or advice.”

These changes will complement the immigration department’s public awareness campaign in the past year to warn immigration and refugee applicants of the use of unauthorized consultants and its improved web-based application tools that make it easier for applicants to file applications on their own.

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One of the two sources also said, as part of the overall crackdown strategy, the Canadian government plans to sign bilateral and multinational agreements with other countries to crack down on fraudulent activities of overseas immigration consultants, who are out of Canada’s reach.

Unpaid third parties, such as family members, friends and not-for-profit community groups, who provide immigration services, would not be affected by the new law.