Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I certainly appreciate the members attending here and inviting us to last night's reception. A lot of your work has to do with educating members of government and members of Parliament, so we appreciate the effort you've made and also your appearing before this committee. We look forward to a long-lasting and good and favourable relationship with you.
I noted when we looked at the material that you provided that your research indicates that we will need to have and attract and go out there to actually get more immigrants into our country. All the reports seem to show that this is what's likely to happen. Of course, we need the infrastructure below that to support the people who do come in and to capitalize on their skills and abilities, and we have been somewhat lacking in that area. I appreciate that since 1994 or thereabouts, funding has not been provided for the infrastructure, even though we had a $975 landed immigrant fee, which could have gone directly to that project but didn't. As you know, we reduced that to half and committed $307 million, a somewhat significant amount, towards that.
One of the questions I have is whether that type of funding, in your mind, is something that is adequate for giving you the infrastructure you need to meet the existing needs. Or are we playing catch-up with that money? Are we able to go forward with the funds we have, or do we need more funding to get the infrastructure in place? That's a question.
The other aspect I think about, knowing the number of organizations that you represent, is that it's quite a colossal event to get everybody working together. I'm happy to see an umbrella organization that can filter down to the ground where the action really happens. It requires a great deal of partnership, but the funding transfers aren't always the same from province to province. I know that there has been some indication that there should be some conditions attached to the funding transfers that might better nationalize the services across the country. You might want to talk about that intergovernmental transfer and some of the conditions that might be attached to it.
Of course, some provinces add funding to federal transfers, which may cause some differences between provinces and regions. And we'll find that smaller centres--I'm happy to hear not only in the rest of Canada, but in Quebec--find that the services might flow towards the metropolises and not to the smaller centres. So the attraction might not be to have the immigration flow to the areas that perhaps most need it.
How do you deal with all those issues? Do you have some thoughts and solutions?