Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the committee for inviting me to speak to you. I'm not a member of the Fraser Institute, but more relevantly, I was the head of the Canadian Immigration Service from 1985 to 1990. So I'm going to talk about—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, you had that right. I'm going to talk about a controversial subject today. I'm going to concentrate on security in relation to Muslim immigration. I think it's an important subject, and it's one that very few people want to talk about, but because of my age, I think I can g

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, that's fine.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Just before I do, can I make one comment on family, which you have raised? It might be worthwhile for the committee to look at what Australia does with the family. They will allow you to bring your parents or your grandparents to Australia, but only if the balance of the fa

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Quite frankly, I wouldn't take the job under any circumstances. It's a thankless one. I think I would do what Bob Andras did when he was elected from the Lakehead and he arrived and found out he was going to be the minister. He started asking basic questions, like why do we have

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I certainly do. I do see value in that. I take exception, I think, to the idea that we have enough staff to handle 250,000 immigrants a year, because they do other things as well. I don't think they do have.... That's not a problem with the sponsored parents and grandpare

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't disagree with that, but I'd like to address the first part of the question, on levels. I'm not in favour of setting a specific level. I think we should go back to how we used to run the program. Supposedly we're bringing in large numbers of immigrants to enhance our lab

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have just one quick point on that. Of the 280,000 immigrants who we took in last year, only about 49,000 were principal applicants or skilled workers selected by the federal government. That's a very small number, about 17%. My figure here shows that the provinces brought in ro

Citizenship and Immigration committee  So if you have freedom of movement and one province brings in a lot of workers, those workers don't have to stay there. They can move anywhere they want. There's no follow-up, no tracing, no control. That's part of the problem I see with the provincial nomination program.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I share your concern about the quality. The fact of the matter is that many studies have shown that the immigrants who have come since 1990 are not doing well. Many of them are living below the poverty line. They're not getting the jobs. A part of that is because of the pressure

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is correct, yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much for asking me to be here.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's going to be hard. I'm going to start by saying that the most effective way of undermining or crippling the management of an immigration program is to allow a backlog to develop. Unfortunately, that's what happened when the 2001 immigration act was passed. It did not, for so

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Of course we're a favourite target of human smugglers because the smugglers know that all you have to do is get on an aircraft destined to Canada. They will provide you with false documents that will enable you to get on the aircraft. Once on the aircraft the smuggler will tell y