Thank you very much, Mr. Bevilacqua, for those substantive questions and your long-standing concern about immigration.
First of all, on the general intake, I would not agree with the premise of your question. In fact, just to give you some statistical insight into this, since 2005 the number of foreign students admitted to Canada has increased from 68,000 to 79,000. That's a 17% increase in three years. Since 2005 the number of temporary foreign workers has risen by 57%. We've now created a Canadian experience class, and a number of those people will be eligible to apply for permanent residency. Permanent residents have increased from 236,000 in 2004 to 247,000 in 2008. This represents a 5% increase overall. The total entry of foreign students, temporary foreign workers, and permanent residents was 520,000 in 2008, up from 453,000 in 2005. This represents an overall increase of 15% from the last year the previous government was in office.
If you really want to compare statistics on this, between 1993 and 1997, in the previous government's first four or five years in office, the total number of permanent residents welcomed to Canada declined from roughly 250,000 to 175,000, a reduction of 75,000 cases. So we've actually increased permanent resident intake in our first three years, whereas the previous government cut it. Finally, I believe that Canada alone, amongst immigrant-receiving developed countries, is planning to maintain immigration levels rather than cut them in this difficult economic year.
As it relates to foreign credential recognition, I have the same problem answering that question as I did the last time. Over 400 regulatory bodies governed by the provinces do credential recognition, not the federal government, so we don't have a statistical basis to track how many people are accredited. Our objective, as articulated by my colleague the Minister of Human Resources, is that once we get in place this pan-Canadian framework for credential recognition with the implication of all the provinces, funded by our $50 million allotment in this year's economic action plan, we hope that all applicants for credential recognition will have a clear answer from the relevant professional bodies within a year of their applications. That's the kind of benchmark we will be setting for the provinces to set for their professional regulatory bodies.
As it relates to processing, wait times for 70% of all economic class permanent resident cases have been reduced from 57 months in 2005 to 43 months in 2007 under our government. Of all non-economic permanent residents, the wait times have fallen from 22 months in 2005 to 13 months in 2007. When it comes to all skilled workers, wait times for the majority of cases have dropped from 43 months in 2005 to 29 months in 2007. As I reiterated today, in the largest stream of our inventory--the federal skilled worker category--we've seen a 15% reduction since the introduction of our action plan for faster immigration, which is really a signal achievement, and probably the first time in a generation we've seen that inventory go down rather than up.
Finally, with respect to the refugee inventory, obviously this is an issue that concerns us.