To all three presenters, I appreciate your presence here today.
I want to get right into the issue before us. The Minister of Immigration comes here and talks about the numbers game. Time and again we hear from the Conservatives that we had the most immigrants come in the last year and how wonderful they are for doing that type of thing. At the end of the day, often when you're travelling abroad, you don't talk about it in terms of hard numbers but in terms of a percentage of your population base.
We often talk about the 1% as being that mark, that generally speaking 1% is at least an acceptable target. We came close to doing that in the early 1990s, in the 1980s we exceeded it, and that's pointed out. But the most important issue in dealing with how many immigrants Canada can have or sustain has a lot more to do with the mixture of immigrants you're allowing to come in. Would you agree? When I say the mixture I'm talking about all the different classes. We know, for example, that if we had 250,000 grandparents come into the country, that wouldn't be acceptable. On the other hand, we could develop a mixture. Would you agree with me in the sense that it's more important to get the mixture right than the actual number of immigrants?