Thank you, Chair.
I would say the issues are serious, because obviously Canada needs to have immigration to meet the requirements and the needs of the labour market. I think all studies show that with our demographics, the only growth that will come in the country is through immigration. With an aging population, we need these talented, skilled people to be coming into the country to fill those labour market needs.
I think there are probably two main issues that I would flag for the committee. One is the whole question of the strategy and the framework going forward. In the report we mentioned in one of the exhibits--exhibit 2.5, which is on page 12 of the English version--significant shifts in the categories, and we saw no analysis that would indicate that this is what is desired. Unless things are changed--and I believe there may have been some changes with the latest numbers that were produced by the department--the federal skilled worker program will go down to 18,000 people.
There's been a significant shift to the federal nominee program, which may be appropriate, but we saw no analysis indicating that this was where the federal government thought the immigration decision should go. There's very little oversight, very little understanding of what kinds of immigrants are coming in under the provincial nominee program. I think it raises the role about what is the federal government's responsibility vis-à-vis these programs. I think that's one issue.
The other issue I think is how to manage the applications. To me, that is a big issue. Even though the number of job categories has been reduced from over 300 to 38, there are still tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of applications coming in every year. Early indications are that this reduction is not having the effect that was desired, and the department is going to have difficulty meeting their target of six to 12 months. So it's a question of how to manage this in a more effective way. Is it reasonable to expect people to wait five years to get a response?
Of course, then there's the monitoring that goes on afterwards and making sure that the jobs are valid. But to me, those are the main challenges this department faces.