Thank you, Mr. Chair, and through you, thank you to our witnesses for coming today.
There are some interesting observations from all of you. It's interesting, we have one person who's interested in tax policies here today, but please forgive me if I don't focus on that, because we seem to have gotten a little bit sidetracked on the immigration issues. Frankly, I think this government has been wrongly criticized by some of our witnesses and by our opposition as well on the intent of this.
Mr. Bissett, I certainly respect your credentials when it comes to immigration and therefore certainly respect your answers that I'm looking forward to hearing on this. I would like to go back to this 945,000 or whatever the number of the backlog is and the system we now have in place. We're working as fast as we can to get rid of that backlog we inherited. The other day the minister told us that last year alone saw the largest number of newcomers in almost 100 years, 430,000.
We've heard that just throwing money at it isn't going to help. We need to change the system, improve the system, make it more effective, and be able to clear up the other issue that is facing us, and that's the labour shortages in this country, skilled labour, bright people who we need to stimulate our economy.
How do we decrease that number? And is that number accurate, or have those people just given up on Canada and gone somewhere else?