Ottawa has launched an information campaign in India to warn prospective immigrants not to use consultants there.

This comes after the federal government recently rejected a recommendation that it take over policing of the immigration consulting profession.

The information campaign is the immigration department’s first paid media campaign, though it does regularly caution applicants and potential applicants to beware of unscrupulous agents through social media and other free communication channels, said department spokesperson Shannon Ker.

“As more Indian nationals choose to come visit, study and work in Canada, more people are falling victim to unethical consultant practices. Many are spending their hard-earned dollars and, in some cases, their life savings on consultant services where they don’t even end up with a visa in the end,” Ker told the Star in an email.

“Applicants, their families in Canada and stakeholders have shared with us how this issue is undermining confidence in the immigration system and keeping families apart. Many of these consultants are encouraging applicants to make repeat paper applications, containing the same information, which makes the whole network less efficient.”

Immigration agents must be licensed by the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council, a self-regulatory body bestowed by Ottawa, in order to offer immigration advice and services at a fee. However, many people, in and outside of Canada, still hang out a shingle as a consultant, charging tens of thousands of dollars for bad advice.

Immigration officials have long recognized this problem in India, one of the major sources of immigrants, foreign students and workers to Canada, attributing the country’s visa refusal rates to unscrupulous consultants and people resubmitting applications based on the same information in their original rejection.

The new advertising campaign comes after Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen announced in the spring that the Liberals were establishing another self-regulatory body to oversee consultants — a third attempt to clean up the industry in 15 years. This was despite a parliamentary immigration committee’s recommendation for the federal government and provincial law societies to take over policing of the profession.

The $51.9 million five-year budget for improved oversight includes money for the Canada Border Services Agency to pursue more investigations and criminal penalties.

Hussen said the new self-regulator will also have more powers to investigate, search offices and subpoena information while fines and penalties will be increased against consultants engaged in unethical and sometimes criminal practices.

Ker said those measures “complement” the India campaign, “which aims to educate applicants who choose to pay for advice or representation on the importance of using an authorized representative and to discourage applicants from using unauthorized, fraudulent consultants.”

Licensed immigration consultants who are members of the existing regulatory body were not happy with the government’s campaign, saying officials should have used the term “unauthorized representative” rather than “unauthorized immigration consultant” in its material. The immigration law stipulates that only licensed lawyers and consultants can offer immigration advice and services at a fee.

“It implies that the existence of criminals is exclusive to the immigration consulting profession,” Dory Jade, CEO of the Canadian Association of Professional Immigration Consultants, an industry advocacy group representing 2,300 members, said in a letter to the immigration department’s operations director general Raymond Kunze.

“Although the campaign aims to protect the consumer, it does so more by fear-mongering than by providing information on the benefits of using an authorized immigration consultant.”

Jade said his association, a steadfast supporter of self-regulating the profession, feared the campaign would harm its members’ reputation abroad and hoped the government campaign would be “modified” in its terminology and language.

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The immigration department said it received 975,000 temporary resident applications — for study, work and visits — in 2018, up 60 per cent from 609,000 in 2017.

The ad campaign in India — in English, French, Punjabi and Hindi — includes newspapers, radio, Facebook, and Google.

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