Thank you. What a very good question.
By 2012, according to all the forecasts, net labour growth, all of it, will be from immigration, because as a country we have an aging population, early retirements, and people having fewer babies much later in life.
To keep our economy going, we need people. Businesses can't stay in business without the right people. They have to be the right people in the right place at the right time. Right now we're not getting those people through our existing permanent resident program, which is why we've had to do workarounds. But workarounds aren't sustainable in the long term. The system is fundamentally flawed. That needs to be fixed. The previous government talked about doing it. The problem is that they never did. Under their watch, the backlog ballooned from 50,000 to over 800,000.
Because there are systemic flaws, we can't just throw money at it, because that won't make the systemic flaws go away. We have to fix the system, the structure of it, which is what these amendments will do, and put more resources towards it, which is what we're doing--$109 million. But we also have to get smarter about how we do things--deploy more current technology, review and revise all our processes--so that we're doing things as efficiently and as effectively as we can to get more people here faster.