I think we have to look at two things here. One is that when IRPA came out, Canada got rid of that concept of, “You're an engineer, there's a list, there's a job waiting for you.” We developed this concept called the human capital model, where we look at your age, your education, your work history, and we hope, based on all those skills and all those assets, you would be able to find work in Canada.
You hear these stories where someone came as an engineer and they're a taxi driver. But I think the new system changed that; it talked about human capital. Perhaps you would be a taxi driver at the beginning, but there wasn't this anticipation that you would be an engineer. It was made very clear, because we got rid of that list.
So we have this new concept of human capital. Then we have a whole other process of people who have jobs waiting for them, employers in Canada, people on work permits, that we're able to pluck out of this backlog as it exists today. I think that sort of solved the process for people who are urgently needed.
Now, there's always the debate on how quick is urgent. Is five months too long for an immigrant? We have to make sure we do the checks, the medical.... I don't know. Maybe we could bring them in on a work permit quicker, in that sense, so if someone has a job waiting for them and they want their immigration.... But the Canada experience class is going to help us out with that as well.
Going back to the 1970s, we talked about streams and pools, certain streams of occupations where we know there are jobs and we can say to people that there is a job waiting for them.
I think we have to look at all of these areas, but it is a very hard question to answer. Governments of today and in the past have all had this difficult question. I really think it's time to sit down and figure out...there is this wonderful country, there is wonderful opportunity, there are wonderful people outside waiting to help us, so how do we manage all of this? I think it's time we took our heads out of the sand and really tried to think of a democratic, responsible way of figuring this out.