Citizenship and Immigration committee  All through the 1980s, we seldom went above 100,000.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I agree that there are two ways of doing it, and maybe a third, which I think is being proposed now by the government, which is to let Canadian employers go abroad to do a lot of the selection. I was the officer in charge in London in the 1970s, and many Canadian companies woul

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Absolutely. I entirely agree. If you look at the 2010 annual figures, 17% of the 280,000 immigrants who came in were selected under the federal government's points system. That's 48,000 and some immigrants out of 280,000 were selected because they met the points. The rest were

Citizenship and Immigration committee  They're not required to meet any selection criteria. The province chooses them.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. Some of the family migrants—parents, grandparents, and children—were not necessarily seen. In some cases, yes, but in most cases it was the principal applicant, the independent immigrant, who was interviewed.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Pretty well all, yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It probably started in the early nineties when the volume of immigrants started to increase to a quarter of a million a year, and the visa officers abroad simply couldn't see everybody, so they had to just do it by paper.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't know the percentage, but visa officers who I know and talk to on a daily basis tell me that very few are interviewed.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can't answer that. I'm not sure.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have the evidence of the deputy director of CSIS, Mr. Hooper, who gave evidence before another parliamentary committee that one in ten applicants in Pakistan got the security screening. That was two or three years ago, when the volume of immigrants coming to Canada was not nea

Citizenship and Immigration committee  They're wrong, and everybody's been attempting to tell them they're wrong, but even fairly recently they've repeated it. So that started them off, and they still have that view. They've created a monstrosity in the Department of Homeland Security, with a budget of $70 billion or

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, we're not. We're much better in many ways than they are on the immigration side. We are more vulnerable on the asylum-seeker side, where we let in 37,000 asylum-seekers in 2008, as I said. They just walk into the country without any kind of screening. They're in the country f

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Definitely. They're also better than we are on the technical side, in some respects. They're ahead of us a little in the micro-biometrics. They screen their immigrants--not the illegal ones who cross the southern border, but the ones who apply from abroad. They get better screen

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I am concerned about the foreign worker program, because we're bringing almost as many temporary foreign workers into Canada as immigrants. They don't have to meet any educational, language, or skill requirements. Some of them are highly skilled and educated, but the bulk of them

Citizenship and Immigration committee  First, Canada has done a great deal on the security side since 9/11. I've got a long list of things that we've done here. We responded quickly and very well. Three months after 9/11, Parliament passed an omnibus terrorist bill. Not everybody agreed with it, but we were shown to b