Thank you for those excellent questions.
First of all, with respect to the first question, on resources for the department, obviously, as minister, like everyone in every department, I could always do more with more resources, but we do live in a world of limited fiscal resources, now more than ever in terms of the economic situation. Having said that, I would remind the member that the budget for the ministry is significantly larger than it was a few years ago. As I mentioned in my remarks, we're at a total budget of about $1.43 billion. I think it was in the range of about $900 million in 2004-2005. Now, a large part of the increase has been a tripling, in rough terms, of settlement funding, but there have been increases in operational funds for the department. As one example, one of the things I mentioned in my remarks is the $25 million additional that has been provided to CIC in this year's budget to work with HRSDC on the issue of foreign credential recognition. I've also discussed today the new funds for the biometrics program. There was the $109 million in last year's budget for expediting processing and dealing with the backlog, part of which is in the supplementary estimates today, I believe.
There are new resources, but could we do more with more resources? Of course. But I can't, in conscience, go to the finance minister and say that ours is the only ministry in need of greater resources. I have to commend the department for managing an ever-increasing workload with the current resources. Right now we're going through a process of strategic review, which means economizing. I'm getting some very sound ideas from the department on how to do it without reducing service levels.
As to your second and very important question, you were referring to some polling that was published in Maclean's magazine about three or four weeks ago, which indicated a troubling level of ignorance and even to a certain degree intolerance toward certain religious minorities in Canada. That is of grave concern to me, obviously, and that's why I'm saying that in a multiculturalism program I think we need to focus on building bridges between one another. In Canada we're very good at congratulating ourselves for being tolerant and diverse, but unless we know one another, that doesn't really mean a whole lot. It's important for new Canadians to get to know old-stock Canadians and vice versa. It's important for new Canadians from different countries and regions of origin and different faith groups to get to know each other. I mentioned in that interview that sometimes I find some of the greatest hostility between people who have come from similar regions of origin, and that's really what I'm focusing on.
I'll just give you one example. There's a project that we'll be announcing shortly in Toronto that I've been working on for a long time for young people from the Somali community who came here as children of refugees with very little or nothing and faced social exclusion, limited economic opportunities. We're setting up a program for those people to find internships in professions typically but not exclusively owned by members of the Jewish community. It's a great way of bridge-building between two different faith communities and providing social opportunities to those kids.