Well, Mr. Chairman, what I'll do is refer Mr. Wrzesnewskyj back to my previous testimony on this. I'd be happy to send him a letter once again confirming the increase between 2005 and 2009 of permanent resident landings from the Ukraine.
Secondly, the assertion that these are, as he suggests in a nefarious tone, secret targets is absurd. In fact, the government tables before Parliament our overall levels plan; it's public domain. The department then develops mission-by-mission targets.
What Mr. Wrzesnewskyj is referring to is, I believe, from an access to information request on the preliminary target, which was accessed through the access to information process. Those targets are subject to change over the course of the year.
But what I find frankly the most offensive about the nature of the question is the notion that we—elected officials, politicians—should be picking over every country in the world, in every one of our 60-some missions around the world, and picking what the numbers ought to be.
Mr. Chairman, this must be a process led and determined by our professional public service. They establish the targets based on their expert knowledge of where the resources are, what the inventories are, what the past demand has been, what future demand is likely to be. None of us, not even Mr. Wrzesnewskyj, has all of that information at our hands.
What I do know is that the total inventory of people in the FC4—parental and grandparental—category for Ukraine was, at the end of last year, 163 people and that we have been processing significant numbers. And of course the department will continue to monitor that and ensure that we have roughly equal processing times for all of the streams of immigration on a global basis.