Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 17th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I think we should begin the meeting, because it is now 3:30. We're going to have a very busy afternoon, as we've got three witnesses today, beginning with the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. They have a presentation to make, which will probably be around 45 minutes.

So let me pass it over to you, Daniel, and you can introduce your people and begin your presentation.

[Daniel Jean, Associate Deputy Minister, Operations, Department of Citizenship and Immigration]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

With me I have my colleague Janet Siddall, the assistant deputy minister of operations, and she's my associate assistant deputy minister. Also with me is a colleague from a different department, Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, and that is Claudette Deschênes, vice-president of enforcement at the Canada Border Services Agency.

We're testing a new tool with you. This is a tool that that we developed in the context of the transition to try to provide a broader review of our program. For the new members, I think it will be a very helpful reference tool for the future. I think for the people who have been members on the committee before, they will still probably get some new information out of this, and it may also help them with some of the questions they may have.

I will move right away to page 2. I'm going to try to give you the highlights from the tool, and then we'll go from there.

One of the first things we're tackling there is the impact of the machinery changes of December 2003, because even though it's been two years in the public domain, it's just starting to filter down.

In December 2003 all the intelligence and the enforcement activities on the migration side of the equation were transferred to the public safety department, and particularly to a new entity called the Canada Border Services Agency, which Claudette will talk more about after our presentation on the immigration program.

On the bottom left-hand corner of that second page of the placemat, we are telling you what the critical impacts of that machinery change were. Really, all the intelligence and enforcement functions, both policy and programs, were transferred to that department. It means that you now have an act, the Immigration Act, that can be amended by two different ministers, and you have two different departments appearing in front of that committee today.

On the right-hand part of the placemat on the first page, we're trying to give you a sense of what our operations are. So if I start with Canada, we have five regions: Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, Prairies, and B.C. and Yukon. We have post-machinery, post-creation of the Canada Border Services Agency. We have fewer than 50 inland offices remaining in Canada, and we have four centralized operations: the one in Sydney, Cape Breton, deals with citizenship and with our permanent resident card business line; the one in Mississauga deals with all the family class sponsorships; the one in Vegreville, Alberta, deals with all the extensions of temporary resident status and most of the process for permanent resident applications in Canada. As well, we have one integrated call centre, which is located in Montreal.

Overseas we have about 91 points of service, but about 20 of these points of service have a minimal presence to be able to assist clients in getting access to our services. The other ones have more elaborate resources.

It gives you a sense of what the total budget of the department is. It gives you a sense of what the total human resources of the department are. It's important to remember that when we say that CIC has 4,000 FTEs, that it is a department with 4,000 employees, that does not include the roughly 1,250 locally engaged employees who work in our missions overseas. They are in the foreign affairs base, but they're actually doing their...[Inaudible--Editor]...resources for the immigration department and are doing the bulk of the work for overseas operations under the supervision of Canadian officials.

The purpose of the next page is to present to you in one giant image what the immigration program is all about. It starts at the left-hand corner by telling you what our obligations are, to table the annual levels plans once a year before November 1 in Parliament. This is where the government sets its objectives. We've put what that plan is for 2006 in red at the bottom left corner. It tells you what the overall plan is. You can see that the range of landings that we are trying to achieve is 225,000 to 255,000, and it gives you the ranges in the various categories.

At the top of that page, we give you the various categories of the most important classes of immigration. You have the economic class, in which, you can see, we have skilled workers. We have business immigrants, and as part of the skilled workers we have the live-in caregivers, who can adjust to permanent residence in the economic class. In the middle you have the family class, where you have spouses, partners, parents, grandparents, and of course all their eligible dependants.

On the right-hand side you have what we call protected persons categories. These are the government-sponsored refugees and the privately sponsored refugees. You also have the people who are approved, who receive protection in Canada either through the IRB or through a positive PRRA process and ask for protection once they have arrived in Canada. We usually refer to that as the in-Canada refugee system.

In the middle we've given you our preliminary results for 2005. You can see that the upper range of the target last year was 255,000. We went above that and we managed to bring in, based on preliminary figures, a little more than 262,000 landings.

On the bottom right-hand part of this page we're showing what the admissibility regime is; what the categories of risk are that may make somebody inadmissible. They may be inadmissible on medical grounds because they pose a public health risk; the example would be tuberculosis. They may be inadmissible on the excessive demand side on medical grounds because they would put too much of a burden on the medical or social services in Canada. They may be a security risk. They may be a criminality risk.

On the left-hand side of that bottom part, you have the criteria of inadmissibility; on the right-hand side you have the screening measures we're applying to these cases.

I have to say that when we do this screening we are assisted by a number of partners who are critical in our mission, and when considering the risk and the threats associated with security, organized crime, war crimes, and illegal migration, with the machinery changes of 2003 Claudette's agency and its sister agencies and directorates within the public safety department are critical partners for us.

I shall move to the next page. What we try to do here is regroup, in saying.... As you can see, we process cases towards becoming permanent residents within Canada. We process a lot of them in our overseas processes. They are subject to some screening, both on health and also on other statutory grounds, such as security and criminality. That's all well and good, but once we bring them into Canada, we all want to make sure these people do well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Just so our late-arriving members will know, we're working from the booklet we have before us. The pages are not numbered, but we're on—

[Daniel Jean]

They're numbered at the top, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We're on the top of page 4, for those who want to follow along.

Okay.

[Daniel Jean]

As I said, we're using that chart to show that so far we've covered the process in terms of receiving applications and processing them, some of them overseas, some of them in Canada, applying the risk screening that needs to be done, whether it's on medical or the other statutory grounds. But once we've selected these people, we want to make sure they're going to do well, and to do that we have a set of integration programs that we are offering in Canada.

In that continuum, we hope that people come here and do well. We give them the best possible assistance to do so. We hope their welcome in society is part of that, as well. And we have some programs. For instance, we have a buddy program, called the host program, where people who are already residing Canada are helping newcomers who are coming here. Then, for people who choose to do so, after a period of time they are eligible for citizenship.

I talk a little bit on the left-hand corner about our integration programs. Right now, it's primarily language instruction, it's orientation, it's that buddy program we spoke about; but we've also realized in the last few years that in order to lower some of the barriers to labour market integration we need to bring in some new tools. So we've developed a portal to give better information to immigrants before they come here on the issues they may face when they come here, what they may wish to do in terms of trying to get their things recognized.

But we've also seen--and the research has shown us this quite a bit--is that one very important barrier is what we call having the right language skills adapted to the labour market. So we've started to offer what we call enhanced language training. This means that it's language training that is adapted to the particular field of work they're involved in. We've got some projects; we have some in the health care industry, we have some others in other sectors.

Citizenship. You can get citizenship by birth, you can get citizenship by blood if you're born to a Canadian parent, or you can get it through naturalization. So through the normal process, you come here as an immigrant, and after a period of three years normally, in the last four years you are eligible to apply for citizenship. That's what we call the naturalization process. I had colleagues who were here this year to talk about the amendment we want to do on adoption, and what we want to do on adoption is treat the adopted kids in the same way as the kids who are natural kids of parents receive citizenship. So people will be processed receiving citizenship right away, rather than having to come, reside in Canada, and apply for citizenship.

On the next page, page 5, it gives you a good sense of our overall temporary resident program. We have three major business lines on the temporary resident program: visitors, temporary workers, and students. We talk a little bit there about what is known as temporary resident permits. The best way to describe the temporary resident permit is that it's a waiver: somebody who does not qualify in some way and we're issuing them a special permit, a temporary resident permit. It's a waiver of some form in admissibility. It may be because they don't have a passport, so the waiver is in lieu of a passport. It may be because we think they don't meet our criteria, but there are good, valid reasons why we should allow them to travel: they're coming to a funeral or something like that. So the permit is a waiver.

On the visitors front, as you can see, the volumes are quite high, and the volumes in all these business lines have been going up. When you look at the trend, the trend for each of these business lines has been going up.

On the visitors side, we approve in the universal fashion about 82% of people. That ranges from about 35% to 99%, depending on the risk associated with the given countries. Most of the 700,000 people who got visas in 2005 were processed in 48 hours or less. It's a very quick process. For the vast majority, it's a same-day service.

Now, I want to put a caveat there. It's true it's a same-day service for you if you happen to be in a location where we're present, but we're not present in every country. So very often if we have to serve some locations where we don't have the volumes to have a local presence, that processing time, when I'm saying hours or most of them in 48 hours or less, doesn't account for the fact that they may have had to courier their passport to us and we courier it back afterwards.

On the visitors, if you exclude the impact on the travel industry of the crisis we had because of September 11, and of SARS two years later, it is an upward trend, and we constantly try to see what we can do to be more productive.

One of the things we have been doing in the last 20 years is issuing more multiple-entry visas for long duration to people we consider to be low risk. Because they're low risk, it's less inconvenient for them and for us. It means we can use our capacity where it's most needed.

On temporary workers, it's the same thing, an upward trend. Right now, given the situation of the labour market in Canada, we're under a fair amount of pressure. We've made some significant improvements in processing time for temporary workers, to the point that 27%--almost three out of 10--are processed in 48 hours or less, and 50%, if I recall, in about 14 days or less.

These, of course, are people who have either already received an HRDC approval to come--a labour market opinion for them to come and enter the labour market in Canada--or who have met one of our exemptions. It may be NAFTA; it may be GATT. There are a number of categories of people who are not subject to labour market opinion.

Foreign students are people who are coming for more than short-duration courses. People who come for short-duration courses are exempted from the need for student authorization. It used to be that if you came for three months or less, you were exempted; since the report, it is six months or less. It's actually one of the reasons the upward trend has been attenuated a little bit in 2002; we don't have to issue as many student authorizations.

This is also a business line in which we've made a fair amount of progress in the last few years. It is also a business line in which we work very closely with stakeholders to try to make Canada more of a destination of choice, so we are now allowing students to work after graduation. In some locations we're allowing them to work for two years rather than one, and we're now allowing foreign students to work outside campus.

I have two pages on refugees. The first page is just to give you a general overview of the world refugee situation and how our program relates to it. As you can see, what we do around refugees is a combination of our international obligations, our values as a country, and what we want to do on the humanitarian side. What is being done around refugees is humanitarian assistance in refugee situations, the international engagement we may be doing around these issues, and resettlement.

When we talk about possible remedies to refugee situations around the world, the UNHCR and the people who follow these things like to talk about three things. Ideally, if we can eliminate the causes that drove people to flee their country, hopefully we'll be able to do repatriation. For example, in the last couple of years there's been massive repatriation in a country like Afghanistan because the situation has improved to such a degree that a lot of people were willing to go back.

If it's not possible and the situation is prolonged, the second best option is probably to try to integrate them in the region. That's what they call local integration.

Refugee resettlement is probably the most expensive, and you can only help a small number of people, but it is often a really good strategic tool to respond to particular situations. If we take the example in recent years of Bosnia and the Balkan war and mixed marriages, because of the way the peace accord and the return to peace were worked out, it was not necessarily easy for mixed couples to go back to one or the other location. Resettlement was a nice option for these people.

The chart at the right-hand corner gives you a sense of the volumes of refugees around the world. That does not include internally displaced people, as in the civil war in Colombia. Millions and millions of people who are displaced but are within their country are not considered refugees; they are considered internally displaced people, yet they are in a very difficult situation.

We're giving you the historical volumes of asylum claims in Canada to show you the volatility. At the right-hand corner, we're showing you there is very little correlation between the people who are in refugee camps and refugee locations around the world and the people who actually come and claim asylum in Canada.

It's the same thing when you look at the indicators of who these people are. The people we tend to see in Canada are younger males That may be because it's easier for them to travel, but it's also a reality of our in-Canada refugee system that we have mixed flows--people who are coming and deserve protection, and we must try to help them. There are also people who are trying to use the system as another way in--a form of migration.

On page 7 there is a simple representation of the in-Canada refugee system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

I think we have some time, so perhaps you can slow it down a little bit. Some people are finding it a little difficult to keep up and would probably like to examine your charts a little more as you go through this.

[Albina Guarnieri, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

In other committees it's usually customary to have a text. Is there no text distributed, other than the flow charts here?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

That's all we have right now that covers the entire presentation. The department could pretty well get us the text of the remarks.

[Albina Guarnieri, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

We can read the transcripts later on, but it's customary in committees to have text so you can actually peruse through it. At least that's been the practice in committees I've been involved in.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We don't have the text today. This is all we have, and it's very good, I must say. But maybe you can slow it down a little so members can try to absorb this as you go along.

Thank you.

[Daniel Jean]

I'd be happy to do so.

In Canada's refugee system, you can present a claim at the port of entry--at the border--when you arrive. Many people also present a claim at one of our inland offices. What that chart tells you is that when that claim is examined up front, before it's referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board, which is the administrative tribunal that examines claims in Canada, there are a limited number of grounds for saying that we're not going to refer you.

If you're what we would refer to as a very bad person, such as a security risk, an organized crime risk--somebody who may pose a threat to Canada--we may be able to exclude you from being referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board. If we have evidence that you received protection in a different country before coming here, we may be able to exclude you and not refer you to the Immigration and Refugee Board and send you directly to a pre-removal risk assessment.

Since the port of entry enforces the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States, if you're presenting your claim at the land port of entry between Canada and the United States and you don't fall within one of the exceptions, you may be returned to have your claim entertained in the U.S., which is a signatory country to the Geneva Convention.

As you can see, most people--97%--then get referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board. There they will determine whether the person is in need of protection. About 44% of people are approved. They will have an application for permanent residence processed for landing in Canada.

People who are rejected have a couple of more actions of recourse. Most of them will ask at some point for a pre-removal risk assessment, where they will say whether they have a fear of returning to their country of origin and will try to make a case for why they should not be removed. Your initial application for a pre-removal risk assessment stays your removal, so you will not be removed until that assessment has been done.

You can see that in 2005 about 2% were approved at that stage. That figure can be misleading, because it includes all countries. It includes people from the United States and western Europe who have applied for pre-removal risk assessments. If you take some countries that maybe produce more of the kind of protection considerations we have at the time, the PRRA acceptance rate can be as high as 16% or 17%, and that's after a number of people have already been approved for refugee status by the immigration and refugee program.

If you've been rejected by the IRB and you're rejected at the PRRA, and let's say you are in a situation where you think you've created roots in the country, and you think that removing you to your country of origin would create huge compassionate problems, huge hardship problems, you can actually apply on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

Now, what is important to understand on this chart is that for the people who come in and pursue their claims--because there are a number of people who, after they claim, do not pursue their claims--about seven out of ten will get some form of status: refugee, PRRA, or humanitarian and compassionate status.

The right-hand side shows the situation in 2001, when the asylum system in Canada was under a lot of stress, and what was done under three different sets of measures, some dealing with access, some dealing with processing these refugees, and some dealing with the consequences, which meant trying to give permanent residence to people we approved and trying to assist people who were not approved as refugees to depart.

On access, we've imposed a number of visas since 2001. We've imposed 11 visas and we've tightened the visa that is used by seafarers to come to Canada. We've implemented the Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S. Under IRPA, we've eliminated what we call multiple repeat claims by people. And that has reduced substantially the volume of claims, and the reduction has really been targeted at the people who are trying to use the system as a way in but are not necessarily in need of protection.

On trying to deal with the process and reduce the inventory, in 2001 there were 52,000 claims in the IRB inventory. That inventory is now around 20,000, and the measures that have been taken there have been measures to streamline the process within the IRB. Some targeted investments and the fact that the intake had gone down has helped to reduce the numbers.

All of these measures also have benefits, because for the people who are need of protection, you can see that in 2005 we landed almost 20,000 approved refugees in Canada compared with a little less than 12,000 in 2001. If we're not directing so much attention to people who try to use the system but are not in need of protection, we can do a better job of trying the help those who are in need of protection.

This gives you a summary of the administrative measures we've taken. You can see that in the same fashion, in our efforts to reach the consequences sooner, the volume of removals or failures of claims has also gone up. Claudette can talk more about that.

The last page on the placemat gives you all our data on one page. In the column on the left you have the levels planned for 2005. You will remember earlier in the presentation that we gave you the plan for 2006. So here we show you what the plan was for 2005, we gave you what was actually achieved in 2005--that's the second column--we're giving you the number of months that the cases have been processed at the 80% median, we're giving you the approval rate, and we give you the state of our inventories at the end of December 2005. The last column is a percentage of the cases that are the in-Canada part of the inventory versus the overseas part of the inventory.

A couple of things are important to note in this table. One is that while we have huge inventories and huge processing challenges, a lot of the time is actually spent in the queue, waiting for your turn to come before you're processed, in some categories such as the skilled workers and the parents and grandparents. In the priority processing lines, like spouses and dependant children or provincially nominated cases and most Quebec cases, we actually have less than a one-year inventory in these cases. Most of them are processed in a year or less. So that's an important consideration.

On the right hand side, we give you our total volumes on the temporary residence business lines, how many visas we issued in these business lines for visitors, students, and temporary workers; we give you what was the approval rate; and we give you a sense, using different medians, of what is the state of our processing time.

The state of our processing time on temporary residence in the three categories is the best it's ever been. I'm not saying it couldn't be better; we certainly always like to improve. But this is an area where we've made a fair amount of improvement, and in some of our immigrant business lines, the processing time for spouses and minor children is also the best it's ever been. We would like to bring it to 80% processed in six months or less. We're getting there, but we're not there yet.

We talked to you about the extensions in Canada, what are the volumes, the time it takes, and the approval rate. When you look at the processing time for these extensions in Canada at CPC Vegreville, it includes mailing times, so there are ten days--five days in, five days out--of mailing time included in this chart.

Then we bring you to some of our other business lines. As you know, in 2002 one of the major document integrity initiatives that were introduced was the permanent residence card. By the end of December 2005, we had issued 1.7 million of these cards and our inventory is almost nil. We're processing them as they come in.

Citizenship also gives you some of our volumes. We've made a tremendous effort on the citizenship front this year to deal with the substantial inventory that we had, and we have made significant progress. I think our clients and the stakeholders will see even more progress this year as this caseload goes through our various field offices.

Then we talk about our call centre. As you can see, there are almost six million calls per year. When we introduced the permanent resident card we were not able to answer even 50% of unique calls. The industry standard is 80%. As you can see, there are now at 89% of unique calls being answered in our call centre, so we've made progress in dealing with access. We know we still have progress to make on the satisfaction front, and we're certainly committed to doing that.

The last chart gives you a sense of the volume of Internet visits we get. It's quite phenomenal. It has forced us to think about how we can use the Web as a better communication tool for our clients. This is another area where we think we have a lot of progress to make. In the service initiative that the minister spoke about, this is an area where we're trying to do some work.

So if you look at pure transactions, not counting call centres and website visits, there are two million transactions annually in the department. When you include the call centre transactions, there are more than eight million transactions per year.

Merci.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you. That was very informative indeed.

Before we go to questions, we have the Canada Border Services Agency. This will be part of the departmental overview as well.

I'll pass it to you, Claudette.

[Claudette Deschênes, Vice-President, Enforcement Branch, Canada Border Services Agency]

Thank you.

I apologize also, because I don't have a prepared speech to share.

The Canada Border Services Agency is responsible for providing integrated border services that support national security and public safety priorities as well as the prosperity of Canada. This is done by the administration and enforcement of various legislation, including IRPA, to facilitate the free flow of persons and goods.

To effectively manage access to Canada, we use the multiple borders concept, and we work very closely with CIC for that. Our issue is to try to keep people who may be inadmissible to Canada out before they arrive. We are the intelligence support for CIC, and we provide screening assistance to them in all their applications for immigrants, visitors, temporary workers, and students to Canada. We are the key people who work on providing an idea of threats and risks to CIC as they do their work overseas, and we provide support both in Canada and overseas, especially on admissibility involving national security, terrorism, war criminals, and people involved in organized crime.

At ports of entry, we are the service arm of Citizenship and Immigration in terms of ensuring that people who arrive in Canada have the necessary visas or travel documents and that their intent is according to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Within Canada, we are the enforcement arm of the immigration program and we investigate, detain, and remove people who have used up their processes under the Immigration Act. We are also responsible for representing both CIC and CBSA at hearings before the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Daniel spoke about officers overseas. We also have 45 migration integrity officers overseas who report to Canada Border Services Agency. They work very closely with Citizenship and Immigration and in most places report to a Citizenship and Immigration program manager overseas. The reason we have done this is that where CBSA is not represented, CIC represents the aspects of migration integrity work.

The work we do there is to work with airlines to try to ensure that anyone boarding a flight has the documents they need to be able to arrive in Canada. We also work with Citizenship and Immigration in anti-fraud. When there is a fraud pattern organized in either facilitation applications or immigration applications or visitor applications, we are the part of the program that assists CIC in developing tools to deal with it.

In Canada, we are the intelligence directorate for both CBSA and CIC. That involves three major...I'm going to call them three big issues.

We do trends analysis: what are the risks that are coming down the pipe; what are the things Citizenship and Immigration officers need to be aware of as they're making decisions?

We also provide screening assistance in cases where there may be organized crime, war crimes, or terrorism issues, where we can provide more assistance to officers in making the decisions overseas and also in Canada.

Also, we are the migration integrity officer support network. At the port of entry, we ensure that travellers arriving in Canada who are visitors or permanent residents have the documentation they need to be able to arrive in Canada.

We also ensure that if there are any medical issues that may have come up since someone got on a flight and arrived at a port of entry, we support the mandate of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act on that.

We also do the front-end screening for refugee claimants as they arrive, and then the cases are referred, as has been indicated, to the Immigration and Refugee Board for processing. In the cases that Daniel called our “real bad guys”, we would help to identify who these people are and make the case for them to be excluded from the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

In the area of detention and removals, we are responsible for detaining people who should be detained under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. We have four detention facilities—one in Laval, one in Toronto, one at the Vancouver International Airport, and a new one in Kingston—for our security cases.

Again, just to provide an overview for those of you who are new to the committee, under the legislation we detain basically where we have reasonable grounds to believe someone might be a danger to the public, where someone is unlikely to appear for an examination or hearing or for removal, or where we have not been able to identify who the person is.

We work closely on detention with the Red Cross and other officials to ensure that we live up to our international obligations. For most long-term detainees who may be detained because they are criminally inadmissible or for other reasons, we work with and use provincial facilities. We do not have MOUs with all of them yet, but with most provinces we do. We are continuing to work to ensure that when our detainees are in provincial facilities we also live up to our international obligations.

As I indicated, we are the hearings officials who go before the Immigration and Refugee Board for both the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and the Minister of Public Safety.

There are a number of reasons we may be going into hearings. In the great majority of cases it is for detention reasons—because we want to keep someone detained—and we will make a case to the refugee board. We will also go in cases of, for example, family class refusals to explain the position of the department on why we believe this person should be not admissible to Canada.

Finally, we do removals. Some people say we do too many; many people say we don't do enough. But we do work on removals. Our priorities of course are to focus on security threats and serious criminality, but we also do failed refugee claimants, which is I guess not overly popular sometimes, and we do that to ensure the integrity of the programs.

As Daniel has pointed out, there are many kicks at the can for people to remain in Canada once people have exhausted their processes. To ensure that the system works, we have to continue removing people who are failed refugee claimants.

We also administer temporary suspension of removals where there are systemic reasons that we think we cannot remove someone for security reasons to certain countries.

I'm just going to leave it at that. I think, then, we can start answering questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you.

Before I go to my colleagues for questioning, let me say we hear a great deal about the 800,000 backlog every now and then. Maybe you can elaborate on that a little bit.

Do we actually have a backlog of 800,000 persons trying to get into Canada? If we do, how long have we had it and what steps are we taking to reduce it?

[Daniel Jean]

If you look at the last page of the presentation in the left-hand corner, you will see that there are two business lines or categories where the inventory is substantial, particularly when you compare it to what the public policy objectives—the objectives in the annual plans that are tabled in Parliament—are. This is in the skilled worker category, where you can see we have more than 500,000 people and our annual objective is between 112,000 and 124,000, and in the parents and grandparents categories, where there was an adjustment of an additional 12,000 last year. The objective was actually 18,000, but we have an inventory of about 108,000.

These are the two categories where you have several years' worth of inventory. The reason for that is that we have been receiving for years more applications as new intake than the objectives set by the government and tabled in Parliament are, in terms of annual levels.

It was particularly true for the skilled workers in the period around 2001. We received a lot more applications in 2000 and 2001 than our objective was as a country for the number of immigrants we can take, so the inventory has accumulated.

In the case of the parents and grandparents, every year we have been receiving a lot more applications than the objectives are set at for annual levels. These are the two categories where the inventories are substantial.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

So that will continue as long as you have this overabundance of applications, I guess.

We will go for our first round, seven minutes.

Blair, please.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your presentation.

I have two quick questions, then we can pass it along for my colleagues here. I noticed on the budget figures--and I wanted to clarify--for 2005 and 2006, the budget was $833.9 million on page 2, and the budget for 2006 and 2007 is anticipated to be $1.226.8 million. Is that correct?

[Daniel Jean]

That's right. That's primarily because the investment that was announced in the budget of 2005 and some of the incremental investments that were announced in the last budget, start to kick in for those fiscal years.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

So that is a 47% increase in our budget of $392 million, which I'm very happy to see.

That leads me to the question I wanted to ask. Looking at the targets and our increasing inefficiency in the department, combined with a big inventory that we're trying to draw down on, would it be reasonable to assume that with a 47% increase in budget we could have a 47% increase in uptake and have a target of around 385,000 people next year?

[Daniel Jean]

Most of the incremental investment--the vast majority of it--is around our integration programs, so they are about improving the outcomes of immigrants who are coming to Canada. It's not about increasing the number of people who are coming, so that would not be a good assumption. It's very much investments that the governments are making, because immigrants have not been doing as well as they had before and we're trying to improve the outcomes.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

And how do we measure the success of those outcomes? What targets, benchmarks, or...?

[Daniel Jean]

We do studies using census data, where we look at income tax, income reported by immigrants, and see how they are doing over a number of years. We compare it to various courts of immigration. For example, we know that our most recent courts are not doing as well as some of the others that we've done before.

We also know from some of the analysis we've done that people who have studied or worked in Canada do much better and much sooner. So this an illustration that immigrants are facing some barriers into labour market integration and we need to assist them more.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

From the documented information you have, is there any information you can glean about the categories of immigrants and say some categories are performing better than others; therefore, we want to increase the number of those people coming into Canada? Have solutions like that been put forward?

[Daniel Jean]

I will answer the question in two parts.

The analytical data, yes, we have that, and the department works very closely with Statistics Canada and tries to measure the outcomes of immigrants in different categories.

For the second part of the question, I think we have to bring you back to what the portfolio approach to migration is like. We're bringing immigrants in the economic streams, hoping they will contribute rapidly to the country.

We're bringing people under the family class because there are people here who will be able to assist them. These people may not do as well in the long run as some of the people we accept in the economic stream, but we're doing that because we believe in family reunification.

We're bringing people in the protection stream because we have values of trying to assist people who are in need. When we do that, I think we accept the fact that many of these people will not be able to do so well.