When Lawyers Throw Stones
A story about advocacy, accountability, and the clients who deserve better.
Not long ago, I had the privilege of presenting before the Standing Committee on Immigration — an opportunity to speak on behalf of the regulated immigration consulting profession. What I didn’t expect was the spectacle that preceded my remarks.
An immigration lawyer took the floor and, without a single verifiable fact, proceeded to dismiss the entire immigration consulting profession before a Parliamentary committee. His claims? That consultants overcharge, lack skill, and that lawyers, unlike consultants, are driven primarily by humanitarian motivations.
I called him what he was: the Boy Who Cried Wolf. A biased alarmist using a public platform to wage a turf war.
I’ll let two cases speak louder than his rhetoric.
Case One: A Tibetan man, a closed door, and a reunion nine years in the making.
A man from Tibet had been approved as a Convention refugee in Canada. He returned to his home country to marry his childhood sweetheart and, upon re-entering Canada, failed to declare his new spouse at the port of entry. As a result, his subsequent attempts to sponsor her were barred under section 117(9)(d) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations — a provision that permanently bars sponsorship of an undeclared family member.
The immigration lawyer he had hired abandoned him after his appeal was refused at the Immigration Appeal Division. No money, no representation. We accepted the referral from a mutual client in similar circumstances. After careful legal strategy and persistent advocacy, the couple walked out of our office together — reunited in Canada, beaming, and deeply grateful.
Case Two: A decade of false hope, a life-altering diagnosis, and a long-awaited approval.
A young couple had been living without status in Canada for years. They had paid a lawyer for a Skilled Worker application — and waited. And waited. For ten years they were told their file was “in process.” We became suspicious immediately: no application is filed without IRCC fees paid upfront, and no file exists without a file number. There was no file.
We reviewed their history and confirmed that they had qualified under the Skilled Worker stream in the year they approached the lawyer — but by the year the file was allegedly submitted, Ministerial Instructions II had disqualified them entirely. The file was never submitted. They had been deceived.
We prepared and filed an Inland Humanitarian & Compassionate application with comprehensive establishment submissions. Midway through the process, one of the applicants received a devastating HIV-positive diagnosis. We responded to the medical admissibility challenge, and — after three years of waiting — the exemption was approved. They wept. After years of uncertainty, fear, and concealment, the finish line was finally in sight.
The bottom line.
The lawyer who stood before Parliament and implied that all immigration lawyers act as saints — and all consultants as charlatans — should look more carefully at the referrals coming through his own profession’s doors. Skill, compassion, and competence are not the exclusive domain of any one group of practitioners. We have repaired too many cases left broken by members of the bar to accept that characterization quietly.
The Canadian Bar Association, and the individual who made those remarks, should be deeply ashamed of this transparent attempt to discredit regulated consultants in order to win a professional turf war. Immigrants — real people with real lives — deserve better than that from anyone who claims to advocate for them.
