Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to return first to the issue of targets and then I want to shift gears and talk about the future. I want to spend a couple of minutes on the past and then talk about the future.
We've been presented with the numbers from 1994 to 2005, but I've seen the numbers from before then. My recollection is that the number of immigrants coming into Canada, being admitted to Canada, was significantly higher during the eighties and the nineties. You referenced the fact that in the 1993 campaign the Liberal Party, in their red book, said their goal was 1%. I think for most people in the early nineties 1% was attainable because that was the number that was on target for Canada to hit in the mid-nineties. Yet when I look at the numbers presented, what I see is that actually with the change in government in 1993, the number of immigrants coming into Canada dramatically dropped. It dramatically dropped in the early nineties, and for the twelve years presented here, the average is only 222,000 per year over that 12-year period. One percent would have been about 320,000 or 330,000. So that promise that was made in 1993...not only did they not get close to it, but they actually eroded the number. And then there were targets established for eight years from 1998 to 2005. For only three of the eight years did the government manage to get within the range of the target.
I asked this question to the Auditor General when she was here recently, and I said I honestly don't see the relevance of this. I see it as a phony discussion that the previous government talked about the importance of this target when (a) they never came close to hitting it in terms of the 1% and (b) even when they set year-to-year targets, they weren't even close. Is this not just a phony discussion we're having?