Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, I'm Felix Zhang.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the committee for inviting me to speak on behalf of the Sponsor our Parents group. My name is Felix Zhang and I am the coordinator of Sponsor our Parents group, which has more than 1,300 members who are sponsoring their parents or grandpar

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, and also, we realize that the age of the inventory plays a part. For example, the inventory in Buffalo is from about six months, but the inventory in Beijing is from more than three years. So people in the queue at the Beijing office have been waiting for more than three yea

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Basically, the inventory has accumulated in the last few years. If we look at the numbers from 2005 to 2009, at the Beijing office only 52% of the applications have been processed. In New Delhi, 100% of the applications have been processed in the last five years. Applications a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Actually, our members are talking about possible recommendations to Parliament to make wait times reasonable for elderly parents. One suggestion would be to bump the overall quotas for the parents and grandparents category. The other thing would be to set up—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Our recommendation would be that parents whose children are all living in Canada should be on a priority list, because they don't have other children living with them back home. They need care the most. There are other things. Parents are a lot closer to a child than are sibling

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a very difficult question for us to answer because we don't have a lot of data to support our suggestions—for example, how much money it will cost Canadians to sponsor these elderly parents. We don't have that data. But our belief is that parents should be allowed to come i

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, definitely. Once we applied to immigrate to Canada, we knew of the program for us to bring our parents here. At that time the wait time was about two or three years, and we made the choice. We immigrated to Canada, we found a job, we are paying taxes. Now for our parents t

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. We are aware that many countries are having challenges in verifying application documentation. The current challenge for us is mostly the wait time.The file has not even been opened, and once the file is opened, it will probably take 12 months to fin

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's a very tough question for us to answer. In comparing, spouses and parents in different cultures have different priorities. In Canadian values we believe parents are closer to their children, and the spouses are as well.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Obviously parents can't come to Canada to visit our sponsors. Our sponsors can go home to visit their parents, but the problem is we all have jobs to do. We are working families and we cannot stay with our parents for a long time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Unfortunately, the other representative couldn't come today.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.