Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I can just add that we've been doing outreach already through missions abroad, through Canadian embassies abroad, so we've been in contact with those countries and are briefing them on the biometrics process. So far so good.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much, Chair. Provinces are very interested in the expression of interest system. In June we set up a federal-provincial-territorial working group. That group has been very busy. We have scoped out a whole different series of areas we've agreed to work on together

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In 2003.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. I can maybe give two examples of that. Sometimes international circumstances develop that require us to in fact leave a particular country. That has been the case in Syria recently. GCMS allows us to do that processing from alternative locations. We're actually using video-c

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, certainly.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. I think, as has been noted in the question, that the credential recognition process in Canada is a complicated one. There are over 400 different regulatory and licensing bodies in Canada. These are provincial bodies. So it is a complicated process that we have here in

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Everybody, in terms of the like-minded countries we work with, is really in a similar situation to us. We have in place, as has been noted, our global case management system. Australia is in the process of finalizing such a system. We actually met with these countries just

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, absolutely. Essentially, that's what we are doing. From time to time we may get a bottleneck at a particular mission or in a part of our processing network, and it allows us to shift that work to another part of the network. We've been doing that since the introduction of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Very straightforwardly, Mr. Chair, those funds are provided for in the budget of the Border Services Agency, not of CIC.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. We do carry out a program of research. Actually, we're also working with provinces on this in terms of trying to maximize the effectiveness of settlement programs. In terms of the research we've undertaken, the single most significant factor in terms of integration, b

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. In terms of our work with the United States on “Beyond the Border”, this is a hugely important piece for giving us comparable levels of security screening to what the U.S. already has. From their perspective but ours as well, as has been noted, the intent is to move the scre

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We are working with the Privacy Commissioner right now to make sure that the processes we use are satisfactory from a privacy perspective, so we will have all of the necessary safeguards in place in terms of the use of that information.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We do a lot of work with provinces and territories in looking at labour market information. As I mentioned earlier, a number of provinces have undertaken their own studies of what their needs are with respect to labour market demand. We compared that to the analysis we have, as I

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, certainly.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Biometrics changes the entire security regime for us and for our partners at Canada Border Services Agency, the RCMP, and CSIS. Having access to fingerprint data and digital photographs allows for case-matching with people who have been in Canada and with our partners. As an exam