It's always a challenge to ask a public official to give you the essence of a program. When I'm in multilateral fora talking about Canadian immigration policy, what we tend to find ourselves saying about the provincial nominee program is that, given its focus on successful economic establishment as a baseline and the positive demonstrated outcomes that we'll see in the report that will be issued in a couple of months, Canada has produced a very interesting hybrid where we can have broad human capital national programs on a considerable scale yet have programs within that overall ambit that meet a variety of specific local and regional needs, whether that be extremely highly skilled people in a certain domain in the Lower Mainland, community building in Manitoba, or skilled tradespersons in Alberta. All of them are doing well both in the short term and in the long term—by global standards extremely well—and eventually becoming Canadian citizens. I think it gives us a policy nuance or agility or responsiveness that probably would be beyond the design capabilities of a federal government because of the way in which we do our business. That's what I'd say about it.
On December 1st, 2011. See this statement in context.