Thank you very much.
Welcome. What you're telling me is what I hear in my riding all the time. I think your perception of the problem that there's a shortage is correct. However, I would disagree with you as to how you get to a solution.
The immigration system virtually overwhelmingly has been run by the bureaucrats, with very little accountability. When we changed the Immigration Act in 2002, it was made incredibly elitist. If anybody wants to review the minutes as to what committee members said at the time, we are shutting out carpenters, we are shutting out tradespeople, we are shutting out labourers, and essentially the statistics bear that out.
We have an incredibly elitist system, and it was designed by the bureaucrats. I've been here for ten years, and seven ministers have come and gone. It's not a surprise that we're in such a mess.
We need to redo our point system. Initially, Australia and New Zealand and European countries did it. The United States is now looking at our open, transparent point system, which in itself is good. What is not good is the way we allocated the points. It doesn't make any sense. If you want to take a look at the point system and look at it in terms of what Australia does and what New Zealand does....
Getting people in here is not rocket science. It shouldn't take five years.
There's a memo that surfaced when the department got taken to court back in 2003. A memo was made to the minister from the bureaucracy. What they essentially say is that we artificially constrained the resources that go into immigration processing because that's the only way they have to control the number of people we let in.
So what you have to do is continually have the backlog back up. Our problem right now is we have our inventory, but not what you're looking for. It was really, really blown. And I say to you it wasn't blown by the politicians; unfortunately, it was blown by the bureaucracy.
The danger of what they're proposing is there's going to be less accountability. They can say all they want, that the minister will do this and the minister will do that. The minister doesn't know. Who's going to do it? It's going to be done by the bureaucrats. What they're saying is they don't want the courts ever to have any oversight of what they're doing, which at first might be really good, except if you need somebody's visa redone, renewed, it doesn't happen, and there's no way you can keep the system accountable.
So we need to redo the point system and get rid of the elitism in there. Just imagine how many people there are out there who want to come to Canada. Labourers? We shouldn't have any shortage of labourers. All we have to do is allow them in.
In terms of processing times, in the Dragan decision it made the point that it takes 10 to 15 minutes to do an assessment of an application, which is followed by a one-hour interview, if the interview is needed. You can get somebody in in less than an hour, but the reason people don't get in is they are kept on the wait line. They have two years before the department gets back to them. It's a dysfunctional system, and the bureaucrats blew it. Now they're trying to come forward with something that even gives them more power, makes it more or less transparent, and makes them less accountable.
I really urge your organizations to take a look at this. Take a look at it. Study it. This committee told the government what was going to happen, but unfortunately we had a new minister, just like we have a new minister now, and ultimately, they went hook, line, and sinker to what the bureaucracy said.