Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to all of you. Thank you for your work with the settlement services.
Mr. Birjandian, you mentioned that you were a refugee; so am I, and so is Rahim Jaffer. A number of us around this table were not born in this country, either.
I flashed on an interesting thing, Ms. Foster, when you were making your presentation. In British Columbia you had 46,000 people to settle last year. I remember that in 1957, when we got to British Columbia, my father managed to buy a house as soon as he got a full-time job. Now, I dare say, when I look at British Columbia, that wouldn't be possible. If I look at the east coast, that opportunity still exists there. When I went out to the east coast, it was quite amazing: somebody can buy a house. To the extent that it can be made known to people coming over, I think that could be very helpful.
There is another issue, and I'm going to throw this out to all of you. Having sat on the committee for a long time, I see two major problems. The first is that our point system doesn't reflect the skills needed in this country. Therefore, we have an estimated undocumented workforce of anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 people. We actually had presentations made to this committee by some Atlantic business groups, asking that undocumented workers be sent to them instead of being sent out of the country. I'm sure our researcher can find it some place.
I would like your comments on those two particular questions.