Thank you very much.
I'm going to take the first round of questions for the Liberals.
I think you really touched on what I wanted to expand on. You mentioned that some people come here for 40 years. As a country, we really have to take a look at what kind of immigration we have and whether we go for the short-term fix or take the long view.
With the way the present point system is set up as it passed in 2002, tradespeople can't get in. They just can't get in. Unskilled workers cannot get in. To put it in another perspective, Frank Stronach from Magna International would not be able to be here today. Somebody closer to home, Frank Hasenfratz of Linamar, who is right next door in Guelph and who has something like 10,000 employees, would not be able to get into the country today. To really bring us as close to home as possible, Mike Lazaridis, of Research In Motion--BlackBerrys--would not be getting in today, because his father was an apprentice tradesperson.
Making that change in the point system drove up the numbers in the undocumented worker class. It actually grew the undocumented workers, with all the accompanying problems that were expressed by the building trades.
Then we have the situation of the temporary foreign workers: people are coming here alone, not with their families.
It's almost a reminder of the head tax for the Chinese. We needed them to come into the country to build the railway. Once they built the railway, we tried to get rid of them, and that resulted in all sorts of problems--the “paper sons” and what have you.
I want to ask all of you whether we should not, as Canadians, focus more on increasing the number of landed immigrants in this country, and recognize that immigration has been the lifeblood, is the lifeblood, and, given the demographics, will continue to be the lifeblood of this country. I would like to have a response from all of you on that question, because it is important to be supporting those all together.
Ms. McLaughlin, would you start off?