Thank you, sir.
I can answer that in two steps. One is that you rightly asked whether, if people don't want to move from other parts of Canada for various reasons, we are going to let Alberta, for example, suffer a slowdown in its economy. No. Immigration has become more of a global phenomenon. Wherever we get the labour cheap or immediately available.... If I have to do something and have a company, then I'm going to try to get somebody from within Canada, but if there is nobody available I should be allowed to bring someone from wherever I can get someone, number one, cheaply, and, number two, readily available.
There are statistics that Alberta alone in our country is short of 400,000 workers, which are required there right away. If nobody is moving from Newfoundland or from Ontario, what do these guys have to do? They have to bring people in. This is my one point.
The other thing was why they should not be brought here directly as permanent residents. This is because the practice of immigration for bringing people into Canada directly as landed immigrants or permanent residents is a very comprehensive exercise. A lot of checks have to be done. A lot of things have to be identified, and this and that. Then, we have a backlog in the department—I'm not criticizing either Tories or Liberals on how the backlog got into the situation, but the fact remains that there is a backlog—so that with 900,000 people on the front line, if I make an application today, I am at the tail end. Right now the waiting period from India is six years, from China it is seven years, and from the U.K. it's four years. Which company here is going to wait for a plumber to come here? If somebody has a construction company and wants fifteen carpenters and ten plumbers, will they wait for six years? No.
What we have to do is bring people in on a temporary basis as a quick thing, and it can be done within a number of weeks. Then the employer has workers here. That is the reason they are being brought as temporary workers.