Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 29th, 2010

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

So basically, once someone has recognized that they are fleeing persecution, oppression, or however we frame the definition of refugees, once they're identified as a refugee in Canada, they are a refugee, regardless of whether it was the UN or any other factors around them. They are a person needing and deserving of our protection.

[Neil Yeates]

In essence, that's right.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Thank you very much. It is important to get that clear.

On my question about the cap, which I was referring to earlier, the backlog was reduced because...from the time the first directive was brought in narrowing the field of workers, that allowed you a little more leeway to get through the existing backlog without adding to it the same size of backlog. However, here is my concern about the cap. Are we refusing people who simply do not qualify because they're not in the right professional stream, or are we not processing their application because, for example, we've already reached some quota number of engineers from India, so we know we're not going to accept any more, and therefore we turn them away, without actually even looking at their application, even though their application, had it arrived earlier in the year, would have been processed and possibly accepted?

[Neil Yeates]

Chair, unfortunately, there are elements of all of those in our system. We have the people we would call pre-C-50, so pre-ministerial instructions. That is the big backlog I referenced. There are no occupational restrictions on that. They were all processed according to the points system, and they still will be. We still have 340,000 to go. So that is that group.

“Ministerial instructions 1”, as we refer to them, were the first set of occupations that were identified, and it is true that the uptake for that took a little while to build up, but then it started coming in a flood. The nature of our business is that as soon as you define requirements, everybody races around to try to make their qualifications fit the new requirements we have developed. There was a bit of a lag, but then it started to build very quickly.

That then led us into “Ministerial instructions 2” at the end of June this year. We took another look at the occupation groups with provinces and territories and employers and narrowed it a little bit, but there were some changes up and down. Also, the decision was made to implement a cap on the number of applications at 20,000 a year and 1,000 for any one occupational group. So far we have hit one of those for the year, for people in business management. It's quite a broad occupational group. We find that the broader the group, the more quickly it gets filled.

We'll see how that goes. We'll continue to monitor it, but we still have a large cadre of that, if you like, open-ended group, the 340,000, to draw from. We have been encouraging provinces and others to draw from that group because there are lots of good candidates in that group.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

You also mentioned, on page 21, the importance of language training. How much was spent on language training in 2009? I didn't see any numbers in here.

[Neil Yeates]

We would have to get you that number, but we certainly can. You mean in terms of language training here in Canada?

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Yes, now--

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I'm going to cut you off at language again. We're out of time.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

It's always language, isn't it? Les Anglais!

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

I know, les Anglais.

Monsieur St-Cyr.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Mr. Yeates, earlier on you answered Ms. Chow's question on wait times throughout the world. You referred to a global quota. Later you said that each embassy has its own ratio of cases to process.

If I've understood you correctly, although you only indicate total numbers in the immigration plans you have, within the department you also have an immigration profile setting out the number of individuals that should come from each region, and you allocate resources based on that. Is that how things work?

[Neil Yeates]

Generally, yes. We need to take a number of categories into consideration.

We look at all of the categories we have--provincial nominees, Quebec selected, federally selected, skilled workers, family class, and so on--and we make an assessment both in terms of our historical experience in terms of countries around the world and then in terms of what the levels plan is giving us with regard to the target ranges for each one of those categories.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

From what I gather, when we decide to take in 150,000 economic immigrants and establish what percentage will come from Europe, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa or anywhere else on the planet, that is a political or societal choice, there is a quota, a profile that needs to be established.

How is that done within the department? I have not seen the mechanism. How do you determine the distribution among various geographic regions?

[Neil Yeates]

It's actually very complicated, how we do that, Chair, because we're trying to weigh all of these different factors. Madame Deschênes, in operations, basically works with all of the missions abroad to try to come up with a plan on how we're going to manage this each year.

Claudette.

[Claudette Deschênes]

With the Government of Quebec, for instance, we agree on what we will grant the province or what it wants to do. Quebec will tell us where it wants its immigrants from. So, we start by saying, for instance, send a given number of cases to Quebec. Then, we look at where investor applications come from. Then, we look at family class, parents and grandparents.

In the end, we always try to balance the number of applications and the number of cases we will be processing, knowing that our resources are somewhat stuck in time. It is not easy to increase resources. Some missions may at times ask for more time because we also look at rates of denial and acceptance.

We do not start by saying, for instance, that we want a given number of self-employed workers from Europe and Africa. That is not our starting point. We start by determining our plan, the inventories in these offices and what needs to be done.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

I understand that you do not start from scratch each year. Ultimately, we decide whether our country will increase or decrease the proportion of immigrants coming from a given region based on the distribution of resources. If we want more, we allocate more. If we want fewer, we allocate less, and we transfer.

[Claudette Deschênes]

That is why the GCMS system is of great interest to us. It will allow us to no longer have to consider things based on the resources in a given place; rather, we can consider total resources and see how we want to expedite cases as quickly as possible.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

It will give you more flexibility to transfer resources from one place to another, even though, physically, they may not be moved from one country to another.

[Claudette Deschênes]

That is precisely it.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Very well.

[Claudette Deschênes]

It can happen that we are unable to process some cases in Africa, as it is difficult. In this case we will be in a much better position to do other things in Canada to expedite applications, for instance.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Ultimately, you are doing the best you can given the allocation of resources based on the targeted immigration profile. We have control over that despite the restrictions you are referring to. Obviously, there is more or less control as far as applications are concerned. You may get a series of applications from one given country because Canada is popular there.

The length of the line-up, in the end, represents the gap between the type of immigrants we are seeking and the number of immigrants from that given country who want to come to Canada. So, this line-up is not solely caused by reasons beyond your control. It is also a result of the immigration profile we are seeking, or that the department is seeking, for Canada.

[Neil Yeates]

Chair, I would say that the system doesn't work as eloquently as is described. Basically we're dealing with a lot of variables that we're trying to juggle. The denominator, really, for all of that is processing time. In an ideal world, arguably, we would have equitable processing times across all the missions, all categories, around the world. In some ways, that is our objective. There are so many things that happen during the year, so many local circumstances, but that's essentially what we plan from.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Tilson]

Thank you.

Mr. Uppal.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's well understood that immigration plays a key role in supporting our economy, especially in this time of global economic instability. Can you please share recent changes made to the immigrant investor program, including the larger financial investments that these newcomers will make in our economy?