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  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  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  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.