Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good morning.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. As I haven't had a chance to speak to most of the members of the committee before—I think only you and Mr. Dykstra have been in previous meetings that I've been at—I'd like to give a quick background on my interest in immigration and my connection with it.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay. These costs don't include old age security or the guaranteed income supplement. One final comment on parents is that when Australia introduced tougher measures for bringing in parents, it was predicted that good immigrants wouldn't apply because they couldn't bring their

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Weston. I suggested that, at the moment, there is a legal obligation to process and that's why, in 2008, legislation was passed that said we can't possibly accommodate all these applications, so the minister has the right to simply not process som

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are concerns in different areas. I didn't mention our humanitarian program, but I think we need a total revisit of our refugee program and our humanitarian program. We should definitely establish annual levels so that we're not misleading applicants. They know that if the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not sure what their backlogs are, but they've certainly tightened up in certain areas. The U.K. has. Australia, in fact, passed legislation back in the 1990s in terms of backlogs of parents, because they were getting huge numbers of applicants. They said basically two thing

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, first of all, yes, the statement that increasing the labour force will depend entirely on immigration is correct. In a sense, I've already answered that, though. The increase in the size of the population or the labour force is irrelevant, and I think in that sense that sta

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The Americans do have a portion of their immigration program that is a lottery. I think that's ridiculous. I think you have to set your caps and then decide on what basis you're going to accept applications. Up until now it's been based on who makes their application first, and

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As for the immigrants, I think better selection is going to have a better match of their skills with what we require. For instance, on credentials, the Australians require that before someone gets a visa, their credentials are going to be accepted in Australia. On the other ques

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Chairman. I will try to stick to my 10 minutes this time. Canada has a long and impressive record of providing protection to refugees. In per capita terms we're among the world leaders with respect to how many refugees we resettle from overseas, as well as the number

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The ones that would be processed more quickly, of course, are those from designated countries such as the United States, and we have hundreds every year from the United States. First of all, these clog up the system with people who are almost never going to get refugee status bu

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's very expensive. By the way, Jack Manion, who was deputy minister of immigration and secretary of the Treasury Board—he's now deceased—estimated before a Senate committee that the whole system costs us several billion dollars a year. The kind of problem we have is illustra

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I wouldn't say they have it all right in all respects. Australia, when it intercepted boats and had the claimants processed overseas, did it because, as one minister of immigration there said—this was after the Iraqi war started—that the UN considered that only 10% to 15% of the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I didn't interview them myself, but in certain communities, quite a substantial number of the people who had terrorist connections came in as refugee claimants.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. I wouldn't say that biometric screening is going to screen out too many terrorists, but I think it's good for other reasons.