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.