Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I understand that this issue presents a number of distinct problems. The first being that, overall, cuts are made to a budget and then, in addition to that cut, the amounts are redistributed, which means that certain cities that were used to having more funding receive less, while other cities receive more. That's what I would like your opinion on. Even Mr. Oliphant clearly stressed that the numbers used by the department might not be representative of where the needs are, because an immigrant may arrive somewhere and then move elsewhere. There may also be categories of immigrants who have greater needs than others. But, in general, I think that we can still figure that needs may shift geographically in Canada over time and that we'll need to adjust the situation.
What astonishes me about the method put forward by the government is the fairly brutal nature of these changes. When the public servants appeared in Ottawa, I asked them quite simply if they could carry out so brutal a transition within the public service. Could they say, "We no longer need 55 people in Toronto, so we are going to move them to Alberta or elsewhere"? They didn't really answer me, but we understand that it's absolutely impossible. I have the impression that we are treating groups like yours a little like labour that is easy to get rid of when we no longer need them, and we just decide to send them somewhere else. That isn't the reality. It takes time to train the people in your organizations, make them efficient so they can provide services and, of course, once the cuts happen, all those people are left with almost nothing. This doesn't mean that they are going to want to move to another city in Ontario or Alberta to continue working.
Often in the public service, attrition is used or funding for new projects in one place is withdrawn to devote new energies elsewhere. Do you think that this might be a more appropriate way of moving people to meet this new demand of immigrants somewhere other than in Toronto, for example? We could say that we are going to continue what's been done already, that we are not going to increase the rate and offers of service, but that we are going to at least maintain it and that new service offerings will go in the new places. So we could try to reconcile the need to move the offer of services while anticipating that we will need to provide some transition.