Thank you.
It's interesting that someone from among the applicants has come to talk to us about wait times. It's been more than three years since I've sat on this committee and been concerned with immigration. I've acquired the conviction that immigration wait times, contrary to what they may be in other systems, are not the consequence of a lack of resources, but of a management method. It seems quite clear to me that the method that current and previous governments have used to control the number of immigrants is to impose more or less long waiting times. It was also indirectly demonstrated by Mr. Oliphant that we don't have regional quotas, officially, but that, in actual fact, we exercise de facto control over the number of immigrants coming from a particular place through the allocation of resources to various missions around the world.
In the case of the health system, the problem is simply that we don't have enough resources to process all the applications and that we're trying to do the best we can. It seems to me this should be different in immigration, particularly since people pay when they file an application; they cover its costs. This isn't a question of money; it's really a question of control. Consequently, some people are experiencing human dramas because they have to wait a number of years to bring in a family member or to file an application for immigration, a temporary visa and so on. The system is unable to meet their needs.
What must we do to solve this problem? In my view, if we want to process applications more quickly, that's an easy matter; we need only increase the resources. In any case, people pay to have their applications processed. Obviously, however, if we do that, we will completely exceed our immigration objectives in Canada. So what do we do? Should we increase the quotas and open the door wider in order to reduce wait times? Will we set much tighter conditions instead so that fewer people wind up in the waiting line and things go more quickly? Do we maintain the status quo and use the waiting period as a brake on the influx of immigrants to Canada?