Holiday season: families want to be together, especially parents with their grandkids, and new immigrants get lonely; they want their parents here.
I saw the backlog list. I think Mr. Yeates told me, and I confirmed the number, that there are 145,000 parents waiting. For Beijing, you have to wait at least five years for parents to come. There are 7,000 from Beijing who are waiting. From New Delhi it is 13,000, and that's a six- or seven-year wait. This is from the various papers that have been given to us in the past.
So if you're looking at applying to sponsor your parents, it's five to eight years before they can come to Canada. The target is only about 13,000 a year. That means the backlog will just grow.
I've met with some of those sponsoring Canadians here, and they've said, “You know, if my parents were from Paris, it would take about a year at most, but they're from Beijing, so it will take about five to six years. That's just not fair.” That is the queue, if you're talking about queue: people are really desperate in terms of the number of years they have to wait for their parents to come.
Is there any way to increase the targets for both Beijing and New Delhi--because that is mostly where the backlog is--and the overall targets in your annual plan for parents? I know you increased it for spouses, which is good, but what about parents?