Feds ignored Mexico visa warnings
The Conservative government went ahead with a plan to require visas for Mexican travellers despite warnings it would overload Canada's diplomatic capacity.
The deputy ministers of Foreign Affairs and International Trade offered that assessment in a July 2009 briefing note to Lawrence Cannon, the foreign affairs minister at the time, according to a memorandum obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.
The memo, written by Len Edwards and Louis Levesque, highlighted "most notably the serious operational issues and challenges at our posts in Mexico as they prepare to become Canada's largest visa processing operation in the world."
The memo arrived on Cannon's desk days before the government announced the new visa requirement on travellers from Mexico and the Czech Republic, designed to curb bogus refugee claims from the two countries. Both countries retaliated by imposing a visa requirement on Canadian diplomats; the Czech Republic also recalled its ambassador.
The document highlights the department's trepidation in coping with backlogs because of a massive influx of visa applicants. At the time, approximately 266,000 Mexicans visited Canada annually, the sixth-largest source of tourists to Canada.
"Given the short time frame, the projects are challenging in every respect. Resources have been diverted from elsewhere in the world to provide the highest level of readiness possible, but the capacity created will not be sufficient for a period of time," the memo says.
Foreign Affairs and Immigration Canada were working to beef up staff, security and technology "on a best-efforts basis with staff and contractors working nights and weekends," the note said, adding it would take eight to 12 weeks to reach 40 per cent of the required capacity to process "priority visitors," and eight to 10 months to reach full capacity.
"The work is being done while operations are ongoing. … This is disruptive and difficult for staff and visitors."
Plans were under way at the time for acquiring a new facility for 80 to 90 staff within 10 months.
'Challenging objective'
"This is also a challenging objective," the memo said, "as it will provide the full capacity required to support the largest visa program in the world and is equivalent to opening an entirely new large-sized mission in a time frame that has never been achieved before."
The two senior bureaucrats also urged Cannon to give a heads-up to his Mexican counterpart, Patricia Espinosa, and her cabinet colleague, Economy Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Mateos, to tell them the government's announcement was imminent, as well as his Czech counterparts.
However, a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable recently posted on the Wikileaks website said the American Embassy in Mexico learned from a Canadian Embassy contact that "the Mexican government was not warned in advance of this announcement."
The memo says Immigration Minister Jason Kenney informed the Czech government of the impending visa decision on a trip to Prague in late June 2009, about two weeks before it was announced.
The government defended its unpopular decision with statistics showing the number of Mexican refugee claimants had almost tripled to 9,400 from 3,400 between 2005 and 2009. After Canada lifted a visa requirement on Czech nationals in 2007, the number of Roma claimants jumped to 840 in 2008 from five two years earlier.
