Visa rules costing Canada billions, study says
Canada is forfeiting billions of dollars in potential foreign investment because of red tape and long waits for business trip visas, a Conference Board of Canada study says.
How to Get a Uzbekistan Visa?
What's more, companies such as Research In Motion are losing hundreds of millions of dollars because cumbersome visa rules set up so many hurdles to filling service contracts, a big share of their revenue.
"RIM is an example of how it's not clear-cut anymore," study author Michael Burt said in an interview. "When a manufacturing company exports a product, it includes the service that goes with that product. It goes both ways now."
Burt found several ways in which Canada's competitive image and investment is damaged by clunky visa rules for business travellers:
Requiring temporary resident visas from China and India, two of Canada's top 10 source countries for business travellers.
Requiring some business people to travel hundreds or thousands of kilometres, sometimes to another country, to apply for a travel visa.
Requiring travellers to hand over passports, sometimes for a 15-week wait during processing, sometimes for months.
Charging double for multi-entry visas, issuing them for five years or less, not making them transferable to a new passport and actively discouraging travellers from applying for them.
Not allowing frequent business travellers with known "sponsors" to get visas quickly.
Putting business travellers in the same first-come, first-served queue as tourists.
Using a variety of not-always-clear rules for visas so that an application downloaded from a government site may turn out to be inadequate.
Canada has lost $8.9 billion lost in inward foreign direct investment, and is sacrificing another $4.6 billion in outward foreign investment, $926 million in the imports of services and $330 million in the export of services, Burt said.
The simplest fix, he said, would be to create a 10-year multiple-entry visa transferable to a new passport that costs similar to a single visa for business travellers, as the U.S. now does.
"It's a pretty simple thing and it would make a stark difference," Burt said. "It would cut down on processing and is something we could do quickly."
How to Read Your Visa?
Burt acknowledges there are valid security reasons for requiring visas or for having foreign offices in countries such as Afghanistan, which aren't major trading partners.
And he commends Canada for having foreign offices in 56 countries with the highest "economic weight."
What is a Uzbekistan Visa?
In a written statement, Citizenship and Immigration Canada said, "In actual fact, Canada continues to reduce wait times for visas, does offer multiple-entry visas, and has and will continue to outsource to third-party service providers, known as Visa Application Centres, the provision of visa services to applicants."
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