Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 29th, 2010

[Neil Yeates]

Certainly.

Just very recently—in fact I believe the changes come into force this week, on Wednesday, December 1—we have doubled the investment amounts and net asset worth amounts for the immigrant investor program. The investment amount is increasing from $400,000 to $800,000 and the asset amount from $800,000 to $1.6 million. It's roughly in the neighbourhood of what some of our comparator countries are seeking for immigrant investor programs--the U.K., Australia, the U.S.--roughly in that ballpark. We believe we will still be very competitive. We've had very strong demand for the immigrant investor program, particularly from China through Hong Kong, so we have lots of applications there to process.

We think it will strengthen the program by making those changes.

[Tim Uppal, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

This government has increased its funding into settlement programs, and that would include language training. Do you know the percentage of immigrant uptake on this? My understanding is it's lower than we'd like. Are there any plans in getting more immigrants to take this up?

[Neil Yeates]

Mr. Chair, on language training itself the uptake is around 25%. That is somewhat lower than we would like. We do have a program right now where we are using vouchers. We've got a couple of pilot projects going on at the moment where we've sent out vouchers to people directly, so they can choose the language school of instruction of their choice. We're measuring this over the first six months, when we send out the voucher, and we're finding so far that the take-up is more than double what it was.

So, historically, in the first six months—and I do emphasize that the time period is important here—it's been about 3%, and through the voucher program it's about 7%. We think that's a pretty significant change, so we'll continue to experiment with different ways of getting the message out and sort of encouraging people to take language programming. As we know from the research, it's a very key determinant of integration and economic success.

[Tim Uppal, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

In your opening comments you mentioned the biometrics program. Can you expand on that? What are the benefits of it, and when will this program be implemented or when do you expect it to be?

[Neil Yeates]

Biometrics, which is essentially the collection of fingerprint data and digital photographs, often using facial recognition software, is a very powerful identifier of identity, and it's very difficult to fool a biometric system.

You may have seen some of the cases in the media from time to time, the most recent example being the fellow from China who used a silicone mask--very creative on his part. But it's very difficult to fool a biometric system because it's your fingerprints that are going to be registered. It's a very powerful technology. It's being used by a number of other countries. It's already been implemented by the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.

We are working on rolling out, in a phased approach, over the next several years, a regime of biometric collection. We already do it for refugees. We do share information on a pilot basis with our partners, particularly the U.S. We are finding a fairly significant match rate with the U.S. It's about 43% on claimants, so it's quite high. Where people are claiming different identities and so on, biometrics is able to sort them out. So it's a very powerful tool.

[Tim Uppal, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I have one final question. You're not online processing, are you?

[Neil Yeates]

We are now for some streams. We're using it for students and temporary foreign workers here in Canada. Those applications are available online now. We're starting to process those applications now using scanned documents and the online application form. That is where we want to go, so we've started that.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

When will you finish the rest?

[Neil Yeates]

We have 35 lines of business, so that remains to be seen, but we will take on the ones that are going to have the biggest impact in terms of processing time.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Our time has come to say goodbye. I want to thank Mr. Yeates, Ms. Deschênes, and Mr. Linklater for coming and chatting about this report with us this afternoon, and for the auditor's report as well. Thank you kindly.

This meeting is adjourned.