Thank you for the question, and I do appreciate you standing in today.
We've actually achieved quite a lot. The previous government introduced a tax, if you like, of almost $1,000 per newcomer to Canada. We cut that in half. This is money that's used to help newcomers integrate into Canadian society. Whereas those levels had been frozen for almost a decade, we added $307 million of new money. That's good news.
We've made it possible for the first time for university students to work off campus for up to 20 hours a week. Prior to that they could work on campus, but we want to help them get involved in their communities, expand their work experience, and make them more valuable employees in the future.
We've also made it possible for temporary foreign workers and for the self-same university students with experience to apply under certain conditions to stay in Canada, apply for their permanent residence from within Canada. No longer will they have to leave and make application and then come back.
As well, we've improved and streamlined the temporary foreign worker program, making it more responsive by opening up special offices in the west to help employers. We've worked with the provinces, with B.C., Alberta, and Ontario, and we're in the process with others, on making lists of occupations under pressure. These are occupations where we know there's a shortage of workers. So when employers come looking for a labour market opinion and ask can they bring someone in, and we're saying no, you can skip that step and go find your people and bring them over. We're accelerating the responsiveness to the labour market needs.
So we've done a lot of things. We've also brought in Bill C-14to help adoption and to help adopted children become Canadian citizens more readily. We've introduced Bill C-57, which is to help protect and keep newcomers to Canada from becoming sexually exploited or abused or subject to human trafficking, and then today I just announced that we want to bring forth further legislation, amendments to the Citizenship Act, to help.