Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It's an honour to be here today and to be able to talk to you about immigration issues.
The backlog is an important issue, but it's not the main important issue. It's really a symptom of an immigration policy in Canada that wasn't working and was generating large numbers of people who are not able to succeed in Canada's labour market. It is also something that was growing out of control, which caused the government to take action.
I give the government credit, with their Bill C-51, for amending the IRPA and implementing the action plan to do something about the backlog. But I think there are real questions about the effectiveness and the efficiency of the action plan.
First, there are many issues about the data on the backlog, and good data is necessary in order to make appropriate decisions. You have probably noticed that, unless they've given you additional data, the main official data was as of December 31 of last year; that was the data used for the consultations. There have been some selective updates provided, but it's very sketchy data and it doesn't really mesh very well with some of the other data. I find this a little bit of a puzzle.
But the global case management system has been implemented. I'm a little bit surprised that it can't produce reasonable data and data that will provide information on who the people in these backlogs are—their age, their sex, their education, where they come from—and various things about how long particular groups of them have been in the backlog. It's just overall data that is presented on the length of the backlog, making an unrealistic assumption that no new applications are accepted after March 31.
I think you have a hard job here. You really have to probe the government a bit more to get information out of them.
Then, of course, there's the real problem. If you consider the backlog to be the main problem, the government has met the objective to a certain extent, as they said, in that the pre-2008 federal skilled workers have been roughy halved. But if you look at the overall federal skilled workers in Canada and the applications that have come after that time, it has gone down only a teeny bit. And worse, the overall backlog is still over a million people. So there has been no improvement there.
The question this raises is why the backlog hasn't come down. I think it's obvious: the federal government doesn't really control the intake flow into the backlog; it only controls a small proportion. Quebec has its own program. The federal government has made commitments under the provincial nominee programs, which they think constrain it.
As a result, the federal government has been relinquishing its ability to control the total numbers under the immigration inflow. It has only been able to apply ministerial instructions to federally selected economic class immigrants mainly, the federal skilled workers and business immigrants, and the inflow of these has been cut down to a low level. The latest cutback was to 10,000 per year. There's a cap on the federal investor program of 700, and the cap was on each of the individual occupational categories. You can see that some of them have already been filled, and we're only three months into the year.
And then on the other hand the backlog of parents and grandparents has increased by almost a half, according to the recent data the minister gave, which showed that the backlog was 165,000, which was higher than the one they presented for the consultations. Wait times for parents and grandparents, with no new applicants, was already at seven and a half years, so it's probably much higher.
I'll make a few critical observations on the backlog.
I think the backlog has been cherry-picked by the government at this point by applying their ministerial instructions with respect to occupational categories and job offers. Although I don't have any data on this, I think those remaining in the backlog are likely to be the least desirable and least likely to succeed in the labour market. Not only that, but they're five years older now than they were when they started this process, and they were already disadvantaged in the labour market, so they're even in a worse position.
The cap on federal skilled worker applications and the occupational filter is really not a very good way to select immigrants who will make the greatest contribution to the Canadian economy. In my view, it represents an excessively bureaucratic approach to what is a serious economic problem: the poor performance of recent immigrants and the government's lack of success in selecting immigrants who will do well in the labour market. It excludes those who may be much more highly qualified new foreign federal skilled worker applicants in favour of the less attractive pre-2008 applicants. And while the arranged employment override is a step in the right direction, it's weighted in favour of temporary foreign workers and doesn't really seem to make very much of a distinction about the quality of the jobs of the people who are being admitted under the employment override.
Parents and grandparents.... Well, that's something that's very expensive for Canada. Just to give you a little bit of a number, Dave Dodge and Richard Dion did a study of the health costs in Canada. Their estimate was, taking men and women, that the cost per person between the ages of 65 and 84 would be about $192,500. If you just do a simple arithmetic calculation and apply that to the backlog, that would cost Canada $31.8 billion during the senior years of the people in that backlog.
Live-in caregivers is a program in the backlog. It's small at 29,000, but I find it very hard to understand why this program survives for so long and who the constituency for it is, given that the main beneficiaries are upper-income people who get a subsidy for taking care of their children in a very expensive way of at-home child care. Of those who come, 40% come to work for relatives. Then, unlike the other temporary foreign worker programs, these people get opportunity for full status after two years and they are entitled to bring in their family.