Thank you, Ms. Chow, and I appreciate your concern about this. As you know, it's an issue that vexes all members of Parliament and every Minister of Immigration. The reality, as you know, is that the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act creates a framework for visas for temporary residents who are foreign nationals, unless their country gets a special exemption based on objective criteria, and ministers delegate their authority to grant those visas to officers who are professional, highly trained members of our public service, who make their decisions based on a review of the facts in an objective manner.
Now I don't want to suggest that they are infallible—they make mistakes, as we all do—but I believe that in the overwhelming majority of cases they're making fair and objective decisions. Those decisions are based in part on the visa officer's determination of the applicants' likelihood to return to their country of origin, and a number of different indices are used to assess that.
I can tell you I visited Chandigarh and Islamabad, in part because of the concerns that had been registered with me about the apparently high rejection rates. I wanted to get a better understanding of what's going on in those missions. I was presented with overwhelming evidence of an incredibly high level of fraudulent supporting documents and the involvement of fraudulent and unscrupulous consultants in making applications. In fact, in Chandigarh I heard about people getting rejection letters that were fraudulent—counterfeit rejection letters—from the consultants whom they hired to file the applications. So our visa officers in some of these missions are dealing with a very high incidence of.... The value of being able to come to Canada has, actually, a monetary value on the black market in certain regions, which is extremely high. This incentivizes a lot of fraudulent, problematic claims, and that compels our public servants to be very vigilant in terms of their acceptance rate.
I'd like to ask the ADM of operations to complement that answer, just quickly.