Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank the panellists for enlightening us with their points of view on this very important issue of best practices. I want to address a couple of concerns I have and perhaps hear your suggestions in relation to how we can improve the present circumstances we face.
What I find very interesting is that I hear often from immigrant groups and organizations that deal with immigrants and refugees that in fact there's a lack of funding to bring about the types of services and to promote services within the communities that would address some of the key concerns that immigrants have.
On the other hand, I see that, for example, funding for language training and settlement aid actually lapses in the neighbourhood of $90 million. I can understand some of the reasons why, and I'm not one who is going to cast doubts about the present government at all. I think that accountability of how money is spent and the manner in which it is disposed of--because we have to respect the Canadian taxpayers' dollar--are extremely important. So transparency and accountability are important. However, I find it very odd that on one hand we have organizations that want more money and on the other hand this lapsing is occurring. Something is amiss here. There's a problem of flow, and therefore even in the administration of your organization, best practices become extremely important. Perhaps some of your organizations missed out on language training funding and settlement funding because either you missed the deadline or you weren't aware of a deadline, or the government transparency and accountability review took longer that it should have.
The point I'm making is this. We can't have this type of disconnect, a disconnect that allows funding to lapse on one hand while on the other hand you're all struggling and looking for more funding. That doesn't make sense to me at all. It also doesn't make sense to me, not because of the organization or the government but because immigrants are overrepresented in the poverty rates, the unemployment rates, and the underemployment rates of our country. So we can't be missing these opportunities.
As you review our best practices, I would like for the organizations to come together, pool their resources, and understand how to better access funding for which there is such a requirement. So that's one issue.
The other issue is that we need to do a better job as organizations. I asked this question to a previous group of panellists. Should you, yourselves, be taking leadership to pool all the information and all the best practices together in an easily accessible website, for example, where you, Mr. Au, Ms. Niazi, Mr. Chang, and Mr. Shan, actually say, “Look, this is what works in my organization, and these are the things that we have done and they work well”?
I'm just wondering whether this type of dialogue is taking place and what we as parliamentarians can do to help you come to that point.
Not all of you at the same time, please.