Thank you, everyone. Good morning.
My name is Alice Choy. I'm also the president of the Association for Business and Community Development in Montreal. We have never gotten funding from the government, even though we work very hard on the different issues, especially helping new immigrants. I've been serving the community for 20 years.
I heard from many people. I just came back from Hong Kong and China last month. I talked to different travel agents when I was in Hong Kong and China, and also when I came back to Canada. We found out there is a problem; Canada's tourism business is not that attractive to the mainland China tourist, and it is highly competitive with the U.S. This is very important to bring revenue to Canada. The reason is a high rejection rate of the visa. Of course, there are many different individual cases for rejection. The main reason is that they find they have an intention to stay in Canada. Those are very big voices, those people who talked to me and made the complaint.
These are very individual cases, and they complain, “How can you judge me and say I have an intention to come to Canada and not leave?” They say they make good money, they have properties, they are professional. Canada, after the eight years, is just one stop, one country they want to visit.
Actually, the Canadian tourist board works very hard and invests lots of money to provide tourism in Canada. While I'm always travelling between Hong Kong and China, most of the time I talk to people and I'm promoting Canada's business in different fields, such as education, tourism, and business. The people I talk to want to come to Canada to take a look, and they form delegations, but unfortunately many of them are rejected.
Recently I talked to some travel agents in Canada, and they said there is also a high rejection rate. Let's say last month they had a delegation for 30 people, but only five got the visa.