Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, victims must provide some evidence, but the evidence can be obtained from other parties. For instance, it can be a letter or a statement from a women's shelter for victims of violence, a statement from a doctor or a family practice, a police report, photographs, affidavits f

Citizenship and Immigration committee  To an immigration officer.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right. It was to ensure that we weren't taking applications that we would not be able to process for many years.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For 2014, the government has established an intake cap of 5,000 cases, so 10,000 to 11,000 individuals. The backlog is much smaller than it was. It was 160,000 persons. It's going to be around 80,000 by the end of the year, but that's still a significant backlog. And depending on

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's a very broad question. I'm not sure how much time I should take to answer it, Madam Chair.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly, a number of changes made in recent years, we think, have enhanced the timeliness and efficiency of our economic categories, particularly in managing intake in such a way as to be able to process applications more quickly. In recent years, we've also introduced the Cana

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm afraid I don't have expertise on our multiculturalism program, so I can only give a very general answer to your question, sir. All of the government's multiculturalism programs, and indeed our settlement programs and the significant increase in settlement funding of late, ar

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't think the changes being made to the sponsorship requirements of the parent and grandparent category would have a direct impact on the health of sponsored immigrants under that category, given that all permanent residents have full access to Canadian medical care and so fo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, immigrants under that category, like all permanent residents, have access to the gamut of Canadian programs. I don't believe I answered your second question about ensuring family reunification.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Canada has never had an open-ended immigration levels plan. We have managed and established priorities between immigration categories for many decades. What happened in the parent and grandparent program was that for many years we accepted far more applications than space alloca

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Madam Chair, I'm not sure it is my role to propose policy initiatives that would obtain support across the political spectrum. That's a difficult question for a public servant to answer.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The future EOI system?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We foresee establishing an electronic pool of interested individuals who meet a set of defined criteria with regard to their human capital, language skills, work experience, education, and so forth. The number of persons in the pool is not the number of people you have to process

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. That's not foreseen. The expression of interest model is not yet in place. It will be another year and there will be lots of policy development and fine-tuning to do. But we foresee it as a tool for selecting the best of the best, if you will, in the economic categories. The

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The expression of interest system aims to ensure that employers seeking employees know the applicants' background. If the employer can get a positive labour market opinion, the employer can add it to the immigrant's file to facilitate selection. Once accepted as a permanent resid