Thank you very much.
I want to get back to the undocumented workers, because you mentioned, Minister, that it would be compromising the integrity. It seems to me that the previous ministers we had all saw this as a problem and they were all working on it.
My dealing with the department goes back to 1998, and I have always detected a level of hostility from the bureaucracy, particularly in doing something like regularization. The fact of the matter is, when you're looking at spending a great deal of resources on rounding all these people up, getting them out of the country, spending lots of money on getting them on the system, and waiting for five years to get them back in, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, if anybody messed up and this was changing those numbers....
When we say that immigrants aren't doing as well as they've done in the past, well, they're not. Obviously, if a physician or a scientist or a lawyer or a teacher drives a taxi, they're not going to do as well as lawyers and teachers and scientists and accountants, if you will, who are employed in their particular profession. The point I'm trying to make is if you get a plumber who is working in the construction sector, and it depends on the plumber, but you compare that plumber to another plumber, I dare say the gap would be a lot more. The point I'm trying to drive home is this problem got created with the point system and is one of the reasons why the numbers have gone up.
Minister, I would urge you to work with all the parties to come up with a direction on this, and I think we can accommodate most of the people who are here. In some respects you could look at them as immigrants on probation. You can't let immigrants into this country on probation. Once somebody is an immigrant, they're an immigrant and they're in. In these cases, if the person has shown that they are contributing to the economy and contributing to the society, then I think there's definitely a case to be made for regularization and letting them work toward status, a landed status, and citizenship.
This is a direction the Americans have taken for their own reasons, because they know if they got rid of all of the undocumented workers in the United States, they would go into a depression. I dare say in Canada we could probably go into a recession.
I urge you to work with all the parties to try to come to a solution on this. Ask your officials to bring you the plans that were being put together for the previous ministers.