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British Columbia’s attorney general has asked the federal government to look into a complaint that a Canadian immigration officer in India made derogatory comments about people from the Punjab region.
Skip Bassford, president of University College of Fraser Valley, was part of a Canadian delegation looking for ways to increase international student enrolment.
While there, he says he met a Canadian immigration officer who claimed that India’s Punjab region has a high number of criminals, serious problems with human trafficking and that residents from the area file a lot of bogus applications to come to Canada.

“I don’t know if I can go so far as to say [the comments] were racist. They were certainly inappropriate and probably a bit, in the context, insensitive,” said Bassford.
B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal, who was part of the delegation but didn’t hear the comments, has since written a letter to federal Immigration Minister Diane Finley.
Indian students are an important source of tuition money for universities around the world, Oppal said, but Canada attracts relatively few of them. He now wonders if immigration officers’ attitudes are part of the reason.
“There’s a feeling that the visa officers are not working in the best interest of Canada,” Oppal said.
He wants to know what Canadian staff in India are doing to bring people to Canada and whether the views of that one immigration officer are shared by others.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/12/19/bc-delegation-india.html