Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant
David Joseph LeBlanc, RCIC-IRB
Managing Director and Senior Counsel, Ferreira-Wells Immigration Services Inc
CREDENTIALS & DESIGNATIONS
David Joseph LeBlanc, our Managing Director and Senior Counsel, is a High Honors Graduate of Seneca College’s Immigration Practitioner Program, and a Member of the Canadian Association of Professional Immigration Consultants. He has been in practice since 2002, having joined an already well established firm founded by Bruce Ferreira-Wells, a former IRCC immigration and citizenship officer. In April 2004, he was among the first hundred registrants listed with the former regulatory body Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants – CSIC, and is now a member of the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council – ICCRC.
David LeBlanc holds the RCIC-IRB designation — the highest licence to practice in the Canadian immigration consulting profession. The IRB endorsement authorizes unrestricted representation before all four divisions of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada:
- The Refugee Protection Division (RPD)
- The Refugee Appeal Division (RAD)
- The Immigration Division (ID)
- The Immigration Appeal Division (IAD)
He is a High Honours Graduate of Seneca College’s Immigration Practitioner Program — at the time the most rigorous pre-regulation training available in Canada — and was among the first one hundred registrants when the profession’s inaugural regulatory body, the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants (CSIC), launched in April 2004. He has maintained continuous good standing through every successive regulator: CSIC, the ICCRC, and now the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants (CICC).
A CAREER BUILT ON PEOPLE
David’s path to immigration consulting is not a straight line — and that is precisely what makes him effective.
Born in Montreal on Bastille Day — the fourteenth of July, France’s national holiday — he spent his formative years in Halifax, where he studied Fine Arts at NSCAD with the intention of becoming an art teacher, and trained as a chef under Richard Middleton, formerly of the Dorchester in London. Those two threads — a visual artist’s eye and a chef’s precision — run quietly through everything he does.
He moved to Toronto at twenty-two and built a career in the corporate world, rising to National Credit and Customer Service Manager roles with a succession of Fortune 500 companies including GE Genelcan, Tremco, Bausch and Lomb, Bushnell, and Honeywell. The discipline of managing credit risk, reading people, and navigating complex institutional processes proved to be unexpectedly perfect preparation for immigration practice.
In 2000, Bruce Ferreira-Wells — a former federal immigration and citizenship officer and the founder of the firm — invited David to join him. Two years later, David returned to school full-time to complete Seneca’s Immigration Practitioner Program with High Honours. He has been in practice ever since, and has been Managing Director and Senior Counsel of Ferreira-Wells since taking on the firm’s leadership.
AREAS OF PRACTICE
David is a specialist across the full spectrum of immigration and citizenship matters, with particular depth in the cases that other practitioners find most difficult:
- Family Sponsorship — including spousal, conjugal partner, and parent and
grandparent applications - Express Entry Economic Class — Federal Skilled Worker and Canadian Experience Class
- Humanitarian and Compassionate (H&C) applications
- Refugee claims and Refugee Appeal Division hearings
- Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) hearings and sponsorship refusal appeals
- Admissibility hearings and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)
- Business Class immigration
- SOGIE-related claims — asylum seekers facing persecution on grounds of
sexual orientation and gender identity
He personally prepares all final submissions to IRCC and responds to every challenge, refusal, and procedural request from the department.
CASES THAT DEFINE THE PRACTICE
David is drawn to the files that others have given up on — cases where the stakes are not administrative but human. Among the cases that stand out across his career:
What these cases share is not complexity. It is urgency.
And a refusal to accept that the system’s first answer is the last word.
ADVOCACY FOR THE PROFESSION
David has been one of the most vocal and consequential advocates for the RCIC profession across its entire regulatory history.
When the profession came under sustained attack from elements of the immigration bar — lawyers who sought to discredit consultants and argued before Parliamentary committees that RCICs posed a risk to clients — David was invited by the Chair and Executive of CAPIC, the profession’s national association, to appear as a witness before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Immigration. He presented a detailed submission articulating the essential role consultants play in the Canadian immigration system, and challenged the characterization that clients were better protected in the hands of lawyers — many of whom, he noted, were themselves engaged in sharp practice.
When CSIC, the profession’s first regulatory body, became the subject of serious allegations of corruption and abuse under its executive leadership, David took the matter directly to the Minister of Immigration — Jason Kenney — at considerable personal professional risk. He was part of the coalition that brought sufficient Ministerial attention to the situation that CSIC was dissolved and a new regulator appointed in its place.
He has been a founding member of PeerHelp, the Immigration Consultants’ Listserv, since 2004 — a professional forum dedicated to continuing education and peer support across the consultant community. He has taught in the Professional Practice Management module at Seneca College, and is a regular keynote speaker at CAPIC’s National Conference on Immigration and Citizenship (NCIC), where he addresses ethical practice, difficult case categories, and protecting both clients and counsel in challenging professional relationships.
MEDIA
David’s expertise has been sought by national media on some of the most sensitive and complex immigration matters of recent years. He was interviewed and featured in a CBC article recognizing his work supporting asylum seekers navigating SOGIE-related immigration claims. CBC Metro Morning host Helen Mann interviewed David about the case of a York University professor whose son faced medical admissibility challenges that threatened the entire family’s immigration status — a case that illustrated the human cost of IRCC’s procedural rigidity.
COMMUNITY SERVICE
David’s commitment to people in crisis extends well beyond his professional practice. For fifteen years he volunteered as a telephone crisis and suicide intervention counsellor with Distress Centres of Toronto. He also served as a family counsellor with the Survivor Support Program, meeting with families in their homes in the aftermath of suicide — some of the most difficult and sacred work a person can do.
In the early 1980s, when AIDS was new, terrifying, and profoundly stigmatized, David was a Buddy with ACT’s Buddy Program, providing companionship and support to three young men in sequence as they faced the end of their lives — at a time when many people in their lives had stepped away.
He was a Big Brother to Brent from age nine through eighteen — teaching him, among other things, to ride BMX bikes.
BEYOND THE OFFICE
David is an accomplished self-taught portrait photographer whose work spans portraiture, travel, and urban scenes. He is a die-hard foodie and a Google Local Guide, posting restaurant reviews from Toronto and from cities around the world. He is a
trained chef — though when friends ask why he never cooks for them, he notes that all his cookbooks are written for crowds of two thousand.
He was past president of The Hemingway, an equity co-operative, and oversaw its successful conversion to a condominium. He is a world traveller and a devoted observer of cities, people, and plates.
David was born in Montreal on the fourteenth of July — Bastille Day, the national holiday of France. He has one item on his birthday bucket list: to be standing in Paris when the fireworks go up, and to allow himself, just for a moment, to believe they are for him.
