Citizenship and Immigration committee  If I could, I will start just by saying that on the government target in general our role is largely consultation. Also, it is our duty to say whether we can do it or not. Because even if we are asked to do 10 times more or even to do twice as many skilled workers, I would tell m

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, we—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We don't have exit control, so we don't know the number of people who don't return. We know those who claim refugee status, or who ask to stay on humanitarian grounds. The number is significant if you look at the number of refugee claims. Many of them came with visas that we issu

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It can't be political; they don't even know, I think, how we split it, so unless they receive the same documents that you do on the political side.... It is largely what we have in inventory with regard to all those categories. Where there is a target, we look at the inventory, a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  My colleague described the work that they do at the mission, where a significant part of the work has to do with temporary resident visas. It has a huge impact on our capacity to make decisions and to issue immigrant visas. In 2010 we had some capacity to do it, because there wer

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The wait time is slightly different in each of our 60-odd missions. The processing time for priority spouses is shortest in Beijing. The longest is probably in Nairobi. It does vary from place to place, but it's not....

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, resources is one of the issues. With regard to spouse processing, it definitely is the case. Other issues have to do with a spike of applications in other categories, such as students or visitors. Our programs are fairly simple and what we call “intake control” has a major i

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would say the challenge of the current government and any government is to make the program as simple as possible. It's definitely an issue. To have a certain amount of control over the intake of applications has a major impact. That's certainly what we see with the last skille

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't have that information. With the current system, when there is a refusal we cannot register the reason for the refusal, whether it's a relationship of convenience, whether it's because the person died, or the person changed their mind. We don't register the reason, so we w

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's almost implemented everywhere; 85% of all the offices have it now. New Delhi and Manila have it, Beijing will in two weeks, and on March 16 our office in the U.S. will be the last one. So abroad it will be done, but not in Canada.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are a number of reasons. One of the reasons is the conditions in Islamabad. It's very difficult, first of all, because of the security situation there, to increase the size of our staff. Essentially, we would have to increase the size of our staff when at any given point th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We don't have a record of how many do have a visa now, but 50% of the parents and grandparents who are currently in the inventory had a visa at some point. So it's a fair number who are travelling back and forth between the two countries. With regard to the processing time, ther

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are a number of reasons why people would want to abandon their applications. What happens is that sometimes we ask for people to provide documents or to do a medical exam, and if they don't do it then we have to close the file. So we don't necessarily know why. Some peopl

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't have the same number as you do, I think.