Mr. Chair, I would like to get a brief overview. Suppose you are a family member here in Canada and you're trying to get someone to visit Canada for a funeral, a birthday celebration, a wedding celebration, or a graduation, for example. These are all important as we would all in this room agree, yet there's a sense of great frustration in terms of when family members are in fact being rejected. I wanted to highlight what I believe has the potential to be a bit of a flaw. When you go through the criteria used to evaluate whether or not to issue a visa it includes—you made reference to this and I'll quote you—that they “have sufficient ties to their home country to indicate they will leave Canada when their visa expires”.
I often question to what degree that rationale is fair and is being fairly applied. I say that because there are individuals who get the sense.... If you are one of those immigration officers reviewing, is there any form of target numbers? For example, if you get an 80% approval rating in one office is there an obligation for an immigration officer to look at it, and if they started to approve 95% of the ones they're reviewing, then a red flag would come up?
It's almost as if there's some sort of a target number that has to be achieved. How does it happen that a person whose father is dying in the hospital and who wants to be able to visit his father, who has a wife he's leaving behind and children he's leaving behind, is still being rejected? There are numerous examples that one could give.
To what degree does the department look into those percentages and the rationale that's being provided? I, for one, think that the system needs to change to take into consideration the family unit and why we're seeing so many rejected. Ninety per cent of the time, yes, finances are one reason, but the biggest reason is that we don't believe the person is going to return to the country of origin. How can they convince anyone that in fact they're going to return to the country of origin, even when they have family members, and so forth?
So there's a great deal of frustration. I only have the five minutes. I realize I've probably gone three minutes into it, but I would appreciate some comment on that, and then, very briefly, I did not know that we extended the multiple-entry visa from five years to 10 years in 2011. That's relatively new. Can you provide some sort of statistic—not now but to the clerk's office—of how many people have actually capitalized on that? I think that's fairly new to the committee, even though it was a policy that was put in place in 2011.
Thank you.