Thank you, Madam Chair.
Welcome, Minister.
I noticed in your opening comments that you talked about declining backlogs, and you mentioned again about the average waiting time being a year, which is also what you said in the House two weeks ago. But if you go to the home page of your own departmental website and click on “processing times”, it gives you all the waiting times for each category as of now. There you will find that for parents and grandparents, for entrepreneur class, and for investor class the waiting times are in excess of five years. For live-in caregivers, it's in excess of three years. For every category, it's in excess of one year. So how, when your own website on the home page says all that, you can possibly say it's one year is beyond me.
Related to that, in the House at that time, a couple of weeks ago, you said my facts were wrong when I said that the waiting time for family class increased from an average of 13 months in 2007, when the Conservatives were in power, to 34 months in 2012—almost a tripling when the Conservatives were in power. The waiting times for the Chinese, for example, went from 7 months to 39 months over those same five Conservative years. You talk about declining backlogs and you talk about one year, but the facts of the matter, from your own website, are totally contrary to that, with huge increases in waiting times over the last five years and with very long waiting times, which cause great pain to new Canadians as of this moment.
That's just to correct the record. That's not my question.
My question is about your EOI system and the fact that you're not going to allow for any consultation on this. It was confirmed by your officials that the ministerial instructions will be released for public comment before they become official. I would argue that the devil is in the details, and there is some advantage to be had in a period of public consultation. I would mention the Canadian experience program. Again, that was sprung on people with no consultation. It left thousands of foreign students and temporary foreign workers in the lurch who thought they had a chance to stay here. Now they don't. There was no consultation.
My question is, why do you spring this on people without affording commentators, third parties, the opportunity to make their comments, which might lead to an improvement in the program?