I think that's a false choice, a false dichotomy, Mr. Chairman.
Obviously family reunification is an important principle of immigration, as underscored in IRPA , but in my judgment, for us to maintain the world's highest relative levels of immigration, we have to maintain a public consensus in favour of those levels. In order to do so, I think we need to demonstrate to Canadians on an ongoing basis that Canada benefits economically from immigration. And that's why I think our number one focus has to be on economic immigration.
Now, having said that, the government is actually being criticized, quite broadly, I might add, for the fact that only about 20% of the permanent residents whom we welcome to Canada are actually assessed for their human capital according to economic criteria.
Yes, 60% of our permanent residents come through economic streams, but two-thirds of them are dependants or family members of the primary economic immigrants. So 80% of immigrants coming to Canada are either dependants, spouses, parents, grandparents, or refugees. Only 20% are primarily workers.
I don't think there are trade-offs with the temporary streams. You do know that highly skilled temporary foreign workers have access to PR through the Canadian experience class, and that's growing and it's good news. Secondly, the largest pressure that we now have, I think, in the system is permanent residency landings for live-in caregivers who come here as temporary foreign workers.
So we're actually expanding opportunities for certain temporary workers to transition into PR, but there's not a saw-off. We're not taking away resources from processing family sponsorship PR applications in order to do temporary foreign workers. Those are separate streams. They're not in competition for the same resources.