Frankly, I'm not sure. The question should be put to the Canadian authorities rather than to me. But to be fair to them, a lot of work has been done on this, and there was a review.
But it's not the case that nothing has happened since. There are regular meetings between Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the CIC, and the authorities of all these countries that are pressing them, of course, at all sorts of levels, from presidents and prime ministers downwards. The risk assessment, as I understand it, is constantly carried on.
What are the factors that go into it? How is it determined that Malta is okay but the Czech Republic is not? I don't know. What I think is more worrying is I'm not sure that the countries concerned really know precisely to what standards they're being judged. But I can guess that some of the considerations legitimately are things like the refusal rate: How many applications for Canadian visas by citizens of county X are refused? If it's a very high number, then you may be justified in digging a little further to wonder why.
Countries are concerned—we are, you are—that people will come on a visa, or if a visa is not required will come anyway, for what is supposed to be a short period, and stay, and disappear into the economy in some way. People are reasonably concerned about that. We don't believe that as economic growth and prosperity spread throughout Europe to these new countries—and they have very high growth rates in recent years—that they are likely to take advantage of a visit to Canada to disappear. There are no convincing data, as far as I'm aware, that that occurs.
Now, I can anticipate an answer to that is that there are no data because there are no data. One doesn't know, and the so-called “overstay issue” is a complicated one, particularly as we don't, by the way—and I don't think you do yet either—record departures from our territories. We record people who arrive, but we don't know when people leave. Now maybe we are all moving in a direction where that will be done.
We were talking in Washington to the people responsible for the U.S. visit system, which has a whole paraphernalia, as you're all no doubt aware, of recording people arriving in the United States, but does not provide for any recording of departure. We are thinking in the European Union of recording entries and exits as well. That will give us some reliable data to go on. At the moment, there are no such reliable data, so one falls back on risk assessment--risk assessment based on the economic status of the country concerned, its prospects, and so on.
Our submission is that the countries of the European Union today, particularly the newer ones, by the way, are growing fast, have very good prospects. Some of them have seen their young workers go to other countries, but the idea that they would come to Canada and then disappear into some black hole in your economy strikes us as unlikely.