Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's correct.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It depends on where the applications are. For each year, close to 50% of the worldwide applications we receive come from China or India. When we talk about Beijing, Beijing and Hong Kong actually have essentially the same workload. The work is divided by province, but ultimately they're all from the same country.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Roughly 40-something percent.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Besides adding resources and changing policies, I'm not sure. It's not for me to answer that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  On the first question, with regard to specialization, a lot of our specialized knowledge comes from our locally engaged staff, who are essentially at the mission all the time. Otherwise, we have people who develop expertise when they learn the language. Many officers in South America have worked in a few missions in South America--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Maybe we could describe what happens when a new officer gets to New Delhi.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It varies according to what we call the hardship level, which is essentially mirroring what the Department of Foreign Affairs does. Where conditions are more difficult, it is a two-year posting. Where they are not as difficult, it is three years. Let's say in the United States or western Europe, it is four years.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In the short term it will not have a significant impact on processing time. It allows us, however, to shift the workload around much more easily. If we have a spike of applications in one place, or if we want to clear a backlog somewhere for whatever reason, it allows us to redistribute work far more efficiently.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We do from time to time. I think the last time I talked to the committee we were talking about Haiti, and that's exactly what we did between an Ottawa office and Haiti itself. Delhi transferred workload to Warsaw two or three years ago to try to use resources that may have been underused somewhere else; instead of moving people, moving work to people.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It depends what we are talking about. The global target is set by the governments; we're not involved. But the individual targets are set by civil servants, to determine whether it should be so much in this mission and so much in that one. The only exception, I would think, would be with certain commitments the minister has made with regard to refugee processing.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a difficult question. If we had twice as many staff abroad, we would still do 11,200 parents, grandparents. It's not necessarily the question of resources with regard to that. It's partly because in some places, or some years, let's say, there's an increase in volumes of visitors.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have local decision-makers, so the cost is different for the two. There is a fairly significant overhead because we are located within embassies. It's between $300,000 and $400,000 for the cost of the position. It's not the salary, of course, it's the cost of the position.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have plenty. We don't need to.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, I--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We evaluated the possibility of setting up the same process in different countries. We did this in Mexico, for example, and in Argentina. The country in the world with the greatest number of business visitors is, by far, China, and it is very difficult to put in place the same process there.