First of all, the government in the last Parliament created the Foreign Credentials Referral Office through the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, with, I believe, a $32 million fiscal commitment. The focus of that office was to provide information to newcomers on credential recognition. Among other things, they have created the Working in Canada web portal, which essentially allows one-stop shopping, either through the web portal or in person at 320 Service Canada centres across Canada and a number of our missions abroad.
This allows prospective immigrants, or those who have been selected for permanent residency in Canada, to get one-stop shopping and coherent information on how they can get their credentials recognized. They can now see, by linking to different professional agencies across the country, which provinces have the most progressive professional associations in their own particular occupations, for purposes of credential recognition. We hope that now that they can begin the process abroad, they won't arrive in Canada and struggle through the red tape, spending their first two or three years stuck in survival jobs trying to figure out how to make applications.
We hope that with the information we're providing them through the FCRO, and now with the expanded $50 million in funding for the national credential recognition framework, they will be able to start their application process, obtain supplementary documents if they're necessary, or even get additional education or take additional courses while they're awaiting a pending immigration decision to Canada. We think this will help people.
We're also funding, through the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, a program called the Canadian Immigration Integration Project, which has three pilot offices abroad, one in Manila, one in Guangzhou in China, and one in New Delhi, which are offering tailor-made, free consulting to people selected for permanent residency in Canada on all issues of integration, but with a focus on credential recognition.
I met with some of these people in New Delhi who had already obtained job offers in Canada and a headstart on credential recognition, because of the two-day seminar we were offering and other assistance.
Finally, the Prime Minister made a platform commitment in the last election to put this important issue on the agenda of the first ministers meeting. He did that on January 16 and secured for the first time an agreement by the first ministers to create a national framework for credential recognition by the end of this year. The $50 million commitment in this budget will help to finance the development of that framework, largely under the leadership of my colleague, Minister Finley, at HRSDC. Of course, that work is going to be assisted by the agreement of the first ministers to create a domestic, open labour market in Canada. One of the problems is that it doesn't matter whether you're coming from abroad or not, but that we still have problems in terms of labour market mobility in Canada.