Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's a pleasure to be here again. My colleague Bob Orr and I are happy to assist this morning with testimony that we hope will be helpful to you as you undertake your study on temporary resident visas, or TRVs, for visitors to Canada.
As the assistant deputy minister for strategic and program policy, I will provide you with a brief overview of our department's temporary resident visa policies. Then Bob, CIC's assistant deputy minister for operations, will talk about some of the operational issues surrounding this topic.
As committee members are aware, Canada welcomes more than 35 million visitors to our country every year. CIC has two main priorities in this area. First, we are committed to facilitating the travel of legitimate visitors to Canada, while at the same time protecting the health, safety, and security of Canadians. Our TRV policies and programs reflect these priorities.
Issuing visas is one of the core services of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Because of this, we are always focused on improving our methods of determining admissibility, bolstering medical screening, and reviewing governance, risk management, and performance measurement in order to best serve visa applicants and Canadians.
In recent years, we have made a number of policy changes designed to streamline the process and to reduce irritants for visitors. Let me give you two brief examples.
In 2011, we extended the maximum validity period for multiple-entry visas from 5 to 10 years. This means that holders of such visas—generally low-risk travellers from visa-required countries—can now enter and leave Canada as they please over 10 years, never staying for more than 6 months at a time.
This is a good example of how CIC is facilitating travel to Canada by cutting red tape for visitors, while continuing to responsibly manage our borders.
We have also made changes in order to best protect the safety of Canadians.
CIC has undertaken a number of initiatives in the context of the beyond the border action plan with the United States. One initiative worth mentioning here, in the context of TRVs, is the systematic information sharing that we are putting in place this year with our American counterparts. By sharing information with the United States on temporary resident applicants—among other foreign nationals seeking to enter our borders—we will be in a better position to detect anyone abusing our two countries' respective systems.
This information sharing builds upon the success of the existing lower-volume information sharing among Canada, the United States, and our other partners in the five country conference, which also includes Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. These efforts have revealed significant cases of identity fraud, criminality, and other information relevant to immigration security.
Those are just a few examples to illustrate how we try to strike a balance in the area of TRV policies and programs. We must facilitate the arrival of visitors to Canada, who bring with them obvious benefits to our country, while always protecting the health, security and safety of our citizens and residents.
Let me now hand the floor over to my colleague Bob Orr, who will discuss certain operational issues related to TRVs.