That's a tough question. I don't know the answer. It's a very important question.
I've worked for a number of years on immigration issues, and the main reason I got into it is that there has been a gradual decline for about 30 years in the relative income and standard of living of immigrant families, not just in Canada but in essentially all developed countries. It appears to be based on a number of long-running basic economic events. The economy is shifting from manufacturing to services. Thirty years ago you could get a job putting on a windshield at a Ford plant with barely any English, whereas now, much of that has been outsourced.
The shift to services means there's a greater reliance on the role of language. For immigrants, particularly the first generation, that can be very difficult. The adjustments are indeed more difficult for those who come from very foreign areas. Again, 30 or 40 years ago most immigrants came from either English-speaking parts of the world, western Europe, or British Commonwealth-type countries, so they came with a common set of perspectives and experiences as to how labour markets operate and so on. Increasingly now, the majority of immigrants come from Asia and the Middle East, places like that, so the adjustment—not just language, but culture and everything else—is much more difficult.
One of the things the federal government has done—and I very much agree with them—in putting together the rules is to place a greater reliance, either within a point system or whatever, on the importance language. If I had to figure out two important things, as research has indicated, they would be education and language. Those are the two biggies.