Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to ask you two questions. One of them has to do with refugees.
Given what is happening in Iran right now, we still don't have Iran as a country from which we consider bringing in refugees in large numbers. I want to know why not. Why has this not happened?
The second question I want to ask is with regard to something Mr. Wilson brought up. It has to do with the fact that if you look at Canada in terms of our population growth, our population growth in the next twenty years is going to come nowhere near meeting our requirements for the workforce. In the next five years or the next two years, it's not going to meet our workforce demand. There had been a great deal of work done over the last three years by the last government—I was the person in charge of it—where we had developed, with fourteen departments, an internationally trained worker initiative. There had been money put through Citizenship and Immigration in order to facilitate this, including a portal that was eventually going to allow people to be able to be assessed before they got here, so that when they got here, they would be able to go straight into a job.
I just want to know whatever happened to that. I hear nothing more about it. I hear about kiosks being put up all over the place, which really doesn't resolve the problem. This is a huge problem. If we're going to be at all productive and competitive in the 21st century in a global economy, we need to do this not only today, but yesterday, because we know we will be dependent on immigration for 100% of our net labour market by 2011.
What are we doing with that program, and what are we doing to encourage not just immigration, but immigration based on the types of people we see ourselves needing here, going all the way from trained construction workers to physicians? Could someone tell me what happened to that program?