Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First, I want to give you regrets from Avvy Go, a key leader in the STATUS campaign. She had fully intended to be here, but unfortunately, with the last-minute time change due to the committee's schedule, she couldn't be here. So we'll try to do the best we can in her absence.
I want to start by giving you a very brief background on how the campaign came about. We have had the opportunity to appear before a previous standing committee, but a number of the members of this committee are new.
The campaign first came together around 2000, so several years ago. Really, it was a move prompted by employers in construction, the carpenters' association and a number of unions involved with construction work, and a number of organizations working with immigrants and refugees, primarily in Toronto. Lawyers and people working in the legal field came together because almost all of these very different constituents noticed that there was a tremendous rise in the number of people without status, primarily in Toronto but also in cities such as Montreal and Vancouver. At that time, in 2000, we had identified this growing population as something that the government, we thought, needed to pay attention to and to look at what in our immigration policies actually contributed to creating this situation and what facilitated it.
In 2002, we had a change in legislation with the introduction of the IRPA, and we started noticing that the situation was exacerbated. In fact, with the new legislation, there was no process to deal with the existing non-status population in Canada, which has continued to grow, based on what we can see.
You must understand that given the nature of the population, it's very difficult to obtain accurate figures on the actual number of people, but at some point, I believe around 2003 or 2004, the Toronto Star reported that they estimated it was around 200,000 people across Canada. That was several years ago. We believe that number would have surely grown since then.
What we brought with us is the proposal for regularization of individuals and families without status that the campaign put together and launched in June 2006. We have reviewed it since then. Nothing has changed significantly for us to change our proposals in this document. We brought copies in English and French.
I'll just quickly go through it, because in a few minutes Francisco will go into some of the highlights of that proposal.