The point I want to make, and I have been making this point time and time again, is we have created an immigration act whereby the bureaucrats pulled a fast one on the minister and the committee members saw what was happening. If you care to go back into the debates, we said this was not going to work, but they put it through, because unfortunately the minister was about as knowledgeable about the issue as most ministers are in citizenship and immigration, which isn't very.
The bureaucrats run the department. Because they eliminated the ability of a lot of a people to get in that the economy needs, they created a whole underground undocumented workers class because that's the only way employers could hire them. If you got rid of the undocumented workers--I think there would be 200,000 to 500,000 in the country, those are the estimates--we probably would be in a much bigger mess than we are now and we'd probably quickly go into a recession in Ontario.
What I'm trying to get at is the response of the bureaucrats in regularizing the undocumented worker is that we can't allow people to get in here by cheating. The demand for workers drove the workers underground. It's the demand, and we have to confront that mindset.
Unfortunately, whenever you get ministers to the point where they start understanding things, as we did with the last one, Joe Volpe, we had legislation that was going to come forward that was going to regularize these people.... If you contribute and if you don't get into trouble and if you're of good character, we'll give you a permit for a number of years, at which point you can apply for permanent residence.
I want to thank you for that.
That's the problem. We have to have political oversight on what's happening in the department. It has a very bad mindset, not a very good record.