Thank you.
I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being here.
Being from Vancouver, I want to extend a special thank you to Mr. Tam for being here. For the benefit of those on the committee and all Canadians watching, SUCCESS lives up to its name. It is one of the pre-eminent immigrant servicing agencies, I think, in Canada. On behalf of the committee, we're very honoured to have you here.
Ms. Casipullai, a thank you to you also, for the work you do in Ontario, for contributing so much to our country.
There's a lot of mis-characterizing of different positions that goes on here. We're here studying the backlog, and we know that we get about 400,000 applications every year. This government has been processing about 250,000 every year for the past five years. You don't have to be a mathematician to see that 150,000 applications a year get added to the backlog. There's now a backlog of over a million.
One of the suggestions of the official opposition is that we look at increasing the annual levels in a prudent way. Last year we let in 0.8% of the population. This government took us from 220,000 annual entries in 2006 to 250,000 today. They've increased 14%.
We also know that Canada's going to face a labour shortage in as little as five years' time, and we will be dependent upon new Canadians for up to 100% of our new labour growth. The official opposition's position is that we should be prudently looking to improve or increase the number of admissions per year up to the 1% number over the next five years.
My question is on temporary foreign workers. Last year we let 182,000 temporary foreign workers into this country. When we talk about getting the capacity right, letting enough immigrants into our country because we do want to see them successfully integrated and working, what is your comment on the policy of this government of growing temporary foreign workers every year, and yet shrinking the number of family class visas that are granted and not increasing the number of annual permanent resident applicants to this country?