Yes, two or three things.
First of all, I want to welcome you here to Canada today and welcome you to our committee. Only two weeks ago I was in Taiwan as part of a Canadian delegation, and I had the opportunity to meet with legislators in Taiwan and to share experiences. I think it's very valuable, so I appreciate seeing you here today.
In terms of the specific point that Jari raised about what happened this weekend, my sense is that it will not change public policy in Canada. I think we will discuss security issues and processes and how we deal with immigrants, but I don't foresee any change; we are committed to this course of action. As Bill and others have said, we are a nation of immigrants. There are hiccups along the way, but I don't think it will cause a serious reassessment of immigration in Canada. We debate whether there will be 250,000 or 300,000 immigrants in a year; I think that's what we are committed to.
I appreciate that it is quite a challenge for you starting something new, or a new program essentially. On the other hand, sometimes having a clean sheet of paper to work with is an opportunity to see what other countries have done and to try to steal some of their good ideas, and maybe avoid some of the problems.
I would make two or three observations. Unlike Bill's or Blair's ridings, I come from a rural area, with a largely anglophone background and smaller numbers of immigrants. I think one of the challenges we have in Canada today is that a large percentage of immigrants do go to our large cities. We actually have parts of rural Canada that want immigrants, including where I live in central Ontario, but even more so in northern Ontario. These mining and forestry communities were populated only 30 or 50 years ago by many Finnish, Italian, and Polish people, who settled there in the 1940s and 1950s.
So we have rural parts of Canada that are trying to figure out how to attract immigrants to their communities. Weather is also an issue here, as most people come from a warmer place than Canada, so trying to attract them into northern Canada, where the climate is harsher, is also a challenge.
In our large cities we are dealing with the immigrant flow coming in, which is welcome, but it brings in some issues with it, and in rural areas we're actually trying to figure out how to get more immigrants to come to these places.
I have a couple more comments. On the issue of whether it's essentially an economic or a social enterprise, I think it's both; I think there are two sides to the same coin. However you start, you very quickly will be into the other, because you're dealing with people. And even if you implement a strategy or a program that's largely economic-based, I think social issues are part and parcel of it, so you may as well deal with them up front.
These are not suggestions, but just some ideas. You could ask questions about what countries in the world have large numbers of people who might be interested in coming to Finland and how well suited they are. Climate is an obvious issue, but as you say, language is another one. Possibly, rather than trying to draw your immigrants from 100 countries in some proportional way, maybe you should look at or target a handful of countries that you have the resources to actually establish a strong relationship with. It would also allow you to build fairly quickly a population of new immigrants, a critical mass of people, who would quickly create their own social institutions, whether it's family or churches or community groups. In a small place, you may find that actually focusing on a few countries initially, and trying to establish links, might work better than a system where you essentially set up criteria and five billion people around the world are eligible to apply to come to Finland.
I don't know. These are just ideas. As I said, that's not the way we do it in Canada, but it might be something interesting for you to consider.
I understand that Finnish is part of a Hungarian family of languages that is spread around, but I'm not sure....