Latest news with #McMullin
Vancouver Sun
25-04-2025
- Business
- Vancouver Sun
Metro Vancouver report shows region building only half the housing that municipalities need
Article content The Northeast Sub-Region, which includes Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, has a need for 4,289 new homes per year versus 2,522 annual completions, a rate of 8.9 per 1,000 population. Article content The Ridge Meadows Sub-Region of Pitt Meadows, Maple Ridge and Barnston Island has a need for 2,046 units per year, but only saw an average 700 annual completions from 2020 to 2024, some 5.5 per 1,000 population, the lowest level among sub-regions. Article content Surrey, White Rock and the Langleys, which comprise the South of Fraser-East Sub-Region, has a need for 14,741 new homes per year, but saw 6,823 annual completions, or 7.7 per 1,000 population. Article content Richmond, Delta and the scəẃaθən məsteyəxʷ Nation, which make up the South of Fraser-West Sub-Region, needs some 5,191 new homes per year but has had an average of 2,302 annual completions, or 6.4 per 1,000 population. Article content The North Shore Sub-Region, which includes Bowen Island and Lions Bay, along with North and West Vancouver, needs 3,606 new homes while only completing an annual average of 1,530 — seven per 1,000 population. Article content Article content Developers '(remain) committed to increasing housing supply' but 'governments must take immediate steps to reduce the cost of building new homes,' McMullin said. Article content Lowering the development cost charges Metro has raised would be one step, she added. Article content Municipalities, however, are under pressure from the province to both streamline approvals for higher numbers of new housing and also pay for the water and sewer infrastructure to allow for that housing, according to planning expert Andy Yan. Article content 'It really goes to the fact that the issue of housing isn't just about zoning and regulations,' said Yan, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University. 'It's (also) attached to things like finance.' Article content Within the overall needs report, however, the picture for housing deemed affordable is more dire with a need for some 11,400 new homes per year from 2022 to 2026, but an average of just 433 annual completions between 2020 and 2024. Article content At that rate, supply barely scratches the known demand of 25,000 to 30,000 British Columbians on waiting lists for affordable units, said Jill Atkey, CEO of the B.C. Non Profit Housing Association. Article content Article content 'The caution I give with that number is there are far, far more people who don't even bother putting their names on the wait list because (it's) insufferably long,' Atkey said. Article content Atkey said the province has made 'historic investment' in non-market housing but filling the gap will require more sustained contributions from the federal government.
CBC
15-04-2025
- CBC
Travel nightmares leave frustrated Canadian permanent residents in debt
From missed work to mounting debt, permanent residents say being stranded abroad without their Canadian identification has left lasting scars. CBC News recently shared Helen Bobat's story. She spent weeks trying to gain approval to fly into Canada without her stolen permanent resident card. The permanent resident of Canada and citizen of Britain made it back home to Ottawa this week after Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) realized her application for emergency travel couldn't be submitted through their online portal because she had too many supporting documents. After her story was published, dozens of people reached out to share their own travel nightmares. "The reality is that permanent residents are not treated as Canadians when outside of Canada," wrote one person. Anyone hoping to fly without their permanent resident card has to apply for a special travel document, a process another traveller called "appalling and totally unnecessary, not to mention extremely costly." Each outlined their own concerns, from technical issues with the outdated portal to inflexible processes. Why can't a permanent resident fly on their passport? Lawrence Wong, a lawyer who has handled immigration cases since 1991, described the IRCC process as "one-sided." "You just feed them with the information and then you wait for their response," he said. The government provides no timeline for receiving a permanent resident travel document, which Wong said often depends on where you are in the world. "The turnaround time could be quite long sometimes. We've seen cases where people actually have to wait five or six months," he said. Wong and other immigration lawyers have one main piece of advice to avoid the long wait: fly to the United States and drive across the border. "That is something that the Canadian government doesn't want people to know," he said. "The reason why that land border route is always available is that we have to recognize PR status when the [permanent residents] are on Canadian soil. "Even though you don't have the papers, they have to let you in." Walking off a plane on a layover at a Canadian airport also works, he said, though it's rarely practical. Wong said forcing people to file an application allows IRCC to examine the permanent resident's history and potentially renege that status. Back from Mexico with $40K in debt When Poonam McMullin lost her permanent resident card while on a trip to Mexico last December, she didn't immediately panic. The long-time Ottawa resident saw no reason why her British passport couldn't get her on a plane home from Mexico. She was mistaken. Despite a pending application for a travel document and evidence of her residency status, Canadian immigration officials instructed check-in staff to bar McMullin from the flight. "We were just infuriated because I'm British. I have a British passport. We're part of the Commonwealth," she said. "It felt like we were being shut out of our own country." McMullin and her husband booked the winter getaway at the same resort where the pair had been married, using a discount that made the high-end accommodations affordable. Then they felt trapped there. Since she'd put that address on her application to IRCC and couldn't find a way to change it, McMullin was concerned about what would happen if a courier attempted to make a delivery there when she was at a different accommodation. "It was absolutely nuts," she said. "We were there in total for five weeks, just constantly waiting, constantly having to extend our trip." They spent only a short part of their trip at a cheaper hotel. Once IRCC approved the application, she had to go through on more bureaucratic hurdle. Since she isn't a citizen, she can't enter the embassy. Instead he had to hire VFS Global, a company contracted by the Canadian government to process courier documents. By the time she realized she could have just crossed the U.S. land border, her passport was effectively in limbo. Mullin struggled to get any updates from VFS Global. Responses were automated and in Spanish, saying only that her application was "in process." Beyond paying for their additional four-week stay in Mexico, the McMullins had to take leave from their jobs and wracked up kenneling costs for their dog, sky-high phone payments and fees for bills that went unpaid. Now the two are focused on clearing over $40,000 in debt. "We were so angry," she said. "Once we got back, we just wanted to put it behind us and just get back to normal life." Urgent case put on back burner Wei Yue said taking his eyes off his bag at a Mexico tourist attraction was a "rookie" travel mistake. When that bag was stolen, it cost him personally and financially. "It was supposed to be just a bit over a week and then I got stuck there for four additional weeks," he said, arriving back in Canada just last month. IRCC's application process was cumbersome, he said, but relatively fast. "The struggle really started because then I had to send it to the company that the Canadian government is working with," he said. VFS Global was in charge of sending Yue's passport to the embassy and then sending it back to Yue with the emergency document inside. "No updates. I called daily; no one knew where my documents were," he said. He was told that applications are processed on a "first in, first out" basis and that even if IRCC considers a case urgent, VFS Global cannot prioritize it. The company confirms that is the case. "VFS Global's role is limited to non-judgmental administrative tasks only," it told CBC News, adding that it "does not control processing times." After almost three weeks of accumulated processing time and hundreds of emails, Yue said his only option was to go "full Karen" — realizing that the only way to get action was to advocate for himself. Yue found and contacted VFS Global executives through LinkedIn. "Suddenly within 24 hours my passport appeared and it was sent to me the next day," he explained, noting that all of the staff he dealt with were "trying to help" but were "bottlenecked by processes and procedures." After Yue returned to Montreal, VFS Global told him there would be an "internal investigation" into his case. While Yue missed weeks of work and wracked up considerable costs in Mexico, he was most concerned about an important appointment he missed: his Canadian citizenship exam. IRCC was able to reschedule it, and Yue hopes to be sworn in soon. Dealing with regret Laura Anthony had hoped to travel to her native Wales late last year to see a loved one who had fallen ill. Instead, she returned to the U.K. for her loved one's funeral. "COVID-19 had prevented me from visiting Pat in the last few years," she said. "Something I will always regret." Anthony first attempted to follow the rules and stay in Canada until she received her renewed permanent resident card. But when the document become trapped in transit by a strike of Canada Post workers, she could no longer wait. "I was desperate. I had to go," she said. "It was a funeral I couldn't miss, you know?" Anthony left Puslinch, Ont., in December and flew to Wales, hoping an email confirming that her renewal application had been approved would satisfy border agents. Once the funeral was over, she found out it did not. "I was devastated. I was in tears. It's hard enough going home for a funeral and then knowing you're missing Christmas with your family because you can't come back," she said. Anthony knew she could travel through the U.S., but didn't want to pay that added expense. Even without it, she and her partner needed $10,000 to pay for added expenses of the additional two weeks abroad. "The loss [of Pat] was bigger for me, but this problem — this problem — just made the loss that much worse,"she said. Hoping for the best Sieghard and Jacqueline Weitzel should have been able to receive her new permanent resident card with plenty of time before they left for Europe. She applied on Feb. 12, and the card was mailed out six days later — just not to the right address. Where the Weitzels live in B.C., Canada Post delivers only to P.O. boxes, and IRCC had sent the letter to their street address. "I think it's a dereliction of duty on the government's side to send such important documents just in a simple letter mail," said Sieghard, who hopes IRCC will consider an option to pay more for courier service. Then he learned that rectifying the mistake would take time. "IRCC told us that we could not apply for a new card to be sent out until six weeks had passed from the day the original was sent," he said, but added there was a silver lining. The Swiss embassy agreed to issue his wife a Schengen visa without it, so the pair could fly out as scheduled. He's also confident that the three weeks they are in Germany will be long enough to receive the document she needs to get back to Canada with her Philippine passport. Help scaling a bureaucratic wall Saskia Tomkins had her permanent resident card when she left her home in Cobourg, Ont., but by the time she arrived in Ireland it was gone. "As you can imagine, I panicked," she said. "I'm a musician, and I was going on a tour with my band, which was sponsored by [the Canada Council for the Arts] ... So I had a deadline I had to get back for." She soon learned it could take months to apply for, and get, the necessary travel document. "It's a crazy bureaucratic system. It takes a lot of documents. And I had to get my kid who's at home to go and find things and screenshot them," she said. "I was sending emails. I was trying to find out how long it would take, and it was like throwing questions at a brick wall." Luckily, though, she did get help. After contacting the office of her Member of Parliament, the application was pushed through. "If we hadn't had the nous to contact our MP's office, I would have lost everything," she said. Response from VFS Global In all of these cases, VFS Global provided services on behalf of the Government of Canada. The company, which calls itself the world's leading outsourcing and technology service specialist, runs dozens of visa application centres for Canada across multiple continents. In Mexico, it runs a centre on behalf of another group contracted by the government: TT Visa Services. VFS Global did not provide an interview to CBC, but answered questions by email. It outlined its role in delivering documents to and from embassies for non-citizens, emphasizing that it has "no role" in expediting applications. When asked how an applicant can reach VFS Global, the statement pointed to an online tracking system. CBC also reached out to IRCC with questions about its relationship with VFS Global.
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Utah businesses lobbied against expanded immigration verification for employees
Seventy-five years of working the land in central Utah has made the economics of immigration frustratingly clear for Robert McMullin. If the federal government continues to fail to reform legal pathways for foreign workers, his nearly 100-year-old orchard, currently being run by its fourth generation of family farmers, won't live long enough to see its fifth generation take charge. 'We'd have to just tear out our trees and do something else,' McMullin said. 'We just wouldn't be in business.' Over the years, McMullin Orchards, located just north of Santaquin, has come to rely on 40 H-2A seasonal workers from Mexico as the 'backbone' of their fruit-growing operation because of the difficulty with finding local employees. But rising overhead costs have created the toughest conditions for McMullin's farm in his lifetime, he said, and one misplaced move by the state Legislature could spell the end of its centurylong run. Practical economic realities for businesses like McMullin's were cited by Utah lawmakers as their central reason for rejecting a return to the state's previous standard for verifying the immigration status of new employees this legislative session. Last week, members of the House Business, Labor, and Commerce Committee voted for the second time not to advance a bill that would require companies with at least 15 employees to use the federal immigration verification tool E-Verify — down from the current threshold of 150 employees. The bipartisan blockade against the policy, which was originally included in Utah's 'compromise on immigration' 15 years ago, came after a concerted effort by the agriculture and construction industries to paint the bill as an ineffective means of reducing illegal activity that would have disastrous outcomes for companies already struggling because of workforce shortfalls. The consensus among many lawmakers and lobbyists on Capitol Hill seemed to be that — public safety concerns aside — putting pressure on private businesses to enforce federal immigration policy is the wrong approach. While McMullin said he never hires unauthorized workers because he can't risk a mid-season raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he still bristles at the idea that business owners trying to make ends meet should be tasked with tracking how prospective employees entered the country. 'There are times when we have left fruit in the field because we have not had enough labor to harvest it in a timely manner,' McMullin said. 'It is not my job to have to regulate the people that come to my front door to work.' Rep. Neil Walter, R-St. George, who sponsored HB214, Employer Verification Amendments, thinks the debate over his bill drifted away from the core issues of reducing identity theft and setting equal standards for companies. 'My feeling was that we ought to be putting the security interests of our citizens first, and we ought to be putting our employers and employees ... on an even playing field,' Walter told the Deseret News. Walter's bill would have increased the number of businesses that must use a status verification system to check the legal working status of new employees from companies with more than 150 employees to include those with as few as 15 employees. The bill originally brought the threshold down to five employees, which was amended to 15 and then 50 in a last-minute effort to gain support. It would have provided companies with more than a year to become compliant before they would be required to use E-Verify for new hires. Walter's proposal also would have reaffirmed that workers who use fraudulent ID for the purpose of obtaining employment are subject to criminal prosecution under Utah's identity fraud statutes. There are currently hundreds of Utah children whose government ID is being used by an adult to receive wages and thousands of Social Security numbers being used by three to 10 last names for employment purposes, according to Utah Department of Workforce Services data. As with other lawmakers who voted against Walter's bill, Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, agrees that identity theft for employment is a real problem in Utah. But he felt that without an enforcement mechanism the law would hurt good actors while leaving bad actors untouched. 'I'm concerned that we're going to have this bill that's a burden on law abiding businesses and then it's not going to accomplish anything,' Thurston told the Deseret News. The arguments against Walter's bill were the same arguments made in 2022 to raise the threshold to 150 employees, Thurston said. Namely, that requiring small businesses to use E-Verify does little to deter immigrants from seeking employment unlawfully and adds extra bureaucratic steps for employers dealing with inflation and a tight labor market. Thurston said that adding penalties in the bill for non-compliant businesses would make it more effective but less politically palatable. That was Walter's original intention but he quickly realized the change 'would have guaranteed that the bill failed.' For Spencer Gibbons, the CEO of the Utah Farm Bureau and the owner of Gibbons Brothers Dairy in Lewiston, the E-Verify debate puts business owners in a nearly impossible situation. While Gibbons does not think E-Verify is burdensome for businesses — the online program simply requires members to enter an employee's information from an I9 tax form — he does believe that requiring small businesses to comply with E-Verify would shrink the 'labor pool down to virtually zero' in some cases. 'You put employers in the position of they have to be the policeman and stand the risk of not having the labor to run their business,' Gibbons said. 'I can tell you that there are not a lot of people that live in this country lining up to go and milk cows.' This debate wouldn't be happening at all if Congress could pass a sensible immigration policy, according to Gibbons. The H-2A visa process used by seasonal farmers is little help to year-round dairy operations like his own, Gibbons said. In addition to expanded visa options, Gibbons said immigration policy must take into account that much of the U.S. economy is now built on immigrant labor. The construction industry is a case in point. Immigrants make up 20.5% of the construction workforce in Utah, according to an American Immigration Council report. This is the largest share of any industry in the state, and translates to roughly 29,000 immigrant workers. Joey Gilbert, the CEO of Associated General Contractors of Utah, said it advocates for its membership to hire only individuals who are legally present in the country. However, this would be easier for companies to do, Gilbert said, if there was an enforceable and uniform E-Verify policy across the country, rather than the current patchwork of state policies. Utahns can expect the E-Verify issue to come up again in future legislative sessions, according to Walter. The bill was just one of a slate of immigration policies introduced this session that would increase coordination between local law enforcement and ICE, and enhance penalties for human trafficking, fentanyl distribution and driving without a license. What this session's E-Verify saga showed, according to Liliana Bolaños, a pro-immigration activist with Voices for Utah Children, is that state policy is often inadequate to address the question of how many people cross the border illegally and what to do with them once they are here. 'Until Congress provides hard-working, well-intentioned immigrants with a viable pathway to lawful status, state level mandates like this will be nothing more than a band-aid solution,' Bolaños said. 'So I think we need to focus our state-level efforts on more effective legislation.'
