Mr. Chair, through you and to our witnesses, thank you once again for being here. Admiral, welcome back to Canada. It's good to see you again, sir.
Before we start our discussion, I'd like to point out a couple of things about where Canada really is. We remain one of the top countries in the world that welcomes refugees. We welcome more refugees per capita than any other G-20 country. Canada welcomes approximately one in ten of the world's resettled refugees and that's more per capita than almost any other country. In fact, our government has agreed to increase the resettling of refugees, in this case, by over 2,500 a year.
As for immigrants, we allowed over 280,000 immigrants into the country last year. The vast majority of them are good, decent, hard-working, contributing people. Those are the people we want in Canada, as Professor Perchal pointed out. We need to attract the best, most industrious minds out there to help us build this country.
Admiral, one of the things you ended your discussion on is the knowledge about our laws an individual has coming into this country. Is ignorance about its laws any excuse when you come to a new country? What's the responsibility of that individual?