Public Accounts committee  I might just add something from a CIC perspective. We process the visa applications. About 80% of workers are returning year after year. It's actually a fairly stable movement. From our perspective, it works quite well.

Public Accounts committee  Eliminating the backlog is really going to depend on how we are able to balance the work with the incoming inventory. As far as the inventory of new applications goes, as I say, we are keeping up with that at the moment. It actually declined a little bit from September to Decembe

Public Accounts committee  Ms. Charette can answer your question.

Public Accounts committee  Sorry, is this the live-in caregiver program?

Public Accounts committee  Perhaps Mr. Linklater could give you some details.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we think that's reasonable in the grander scheme of things.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. In December of last year, we put forward some regulatory amendments that are effective now, April 1 of this year, to strengthen the protections for live-in caregivers. There are a number of important things there. Employers must now provide health insurance at no cos

Public Accounts committee  Very good. Perhaps I can start. There are approximately 200,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. There is a balance and certainly a relationship to the permanent immigration stream. Some of those do make their way into permanent immigration. A number of provinces in particu

Public Accounts committee  I'll ask Les to speak more specifically to the requirements for temporary foreign workers.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. I should just note that it was 45 million, but it's still a lot of people either way.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, it's a lot.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that's right. I think really the shape of it will be a revised list of occupations that are seen to be in demand over the next five years, based on our national assessment, and then put that alongside assessment by provinces and other stakeholders. One of the tricky things

Public Accounts committee  Yes. We picked up on the advice and recommendations made by the Auditor General's office to work with the provinces and territories to try to develop a common vision for immigration. It's a little unusual in that it's an area of shared jurisdiction. We met with the provinces an

Public Accounts committee  Basically the short answer, I think, Member, is by a lot of hard work from the missions overseas and here in Canada. We have set up a centralized intake office in Sydney, Cape Breton, to try to have a more efficient process for the first level of determination of the applicabili

Public Accounts committee  Yes. Perhaps I can just pick up on what the Auditor General has said. The number of new applications that we have received under the ministerial instructions is somewhat higher than we expected. Of course, as I said, many people are looking to come to Canada, so they look for wa