Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to get a couple of general observations and questions on the record.
In regard to immigration levels, the issue with immigration levels is not as much what is the hard number, it's the actual mixture. For example, if you're going to have 100,000 immigrants come in this year and 100,000 of them are going to be grandparents, it's not going to work. The answer, when you talk about what should be Canada's number of immigrants per year, has a lot more to do with what kind of mixture of immigrants we're having come into the country. I would like affirmation on that particular point.
In regard to the backlogs, we've heard that the backlog problem is not an issue of staffing resources. We have enough people around the world, in our embassies, who are able and quite capable of being able to deal with providing Canada with the number of immigrants we need in a year.
Could I have very brief comments on those two points?