Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's a true pleasure to be here with everyone today.
There are three things: trends, justice, and processing time. I waded through the bank of immigration statistics. I focused on the period recently available, January to September 2013, to get a flavour of what we're really dealing with here on temporary entry. Temporary entry, that's our future.
The results are counterintuitive.
First, on our foreign-student flow, we're betting a good part of the bank on canvassing foreign students as our future immigrants to Canada. Well, between January and September 2013, we had about 50,000 males and 43,000 females. There are 22,000 males, as opposed to 18,000 females, with university education. That's not a terrible variation.
What is a variation of note is foreign workers. Heads-up. During the same period, we documented 125,000 males and 58,000 females. We are relying on the foreign worker flow as the window, the gateway, to our skilled worker programs, our PNP programs. Someone may want to look a little closer at how it is that significantly more males than females appear to qualify for work permits. If ever there was a gender variation, this is it.
In terms of processing times, remarkably no witness has commented on the impact of processing time reduction as it concerns women specifically. Because we have moved to an immigration processing system that is virtually just-in-time inventory, where processing times have cut from half-decades to half-years, in things such as family reunification the cascade of savings provincially remains uncounted.
When I was starting out in this field, three- to four-year delays on family reunification for temporary foreign workers, skilled immigrants, or live-in caregivers with their families were the norm. Well, guess what happens when you leave adolescents in the home country to fester their anger and resentment, splitting families? Impacts on the social support system provincially, impacts on our criminal justice system, and problems that arise due to immigration separation of families. Gone, because of the changes in immigration processing times of late.
Who's the beneficiary? The entire family. But more often than not, for example, in the live-in caregiver program, it was the woman in Canada working for years to access the gateway of permanent residency, leaving a family behind.... And when that family was reunited....Toronto is the example of what happens when you have angry adolescents with integration problems. I want to underline the impact of processing time reductions as it affects this issue.
Finally, on justice, what's going on here in the immigration field should not be considered in isolation of other programs, federal and provincial. We hear from the RCMP, the CBSA, and CIC that it's not enough. This issue is wider than a single silo.
It's an issue of justice. The Department of Justice should properly pick up the baton here and allocate resources, get the stakeholders around the table, and lead in the study of how women in particular are affected by these changes on immigration and other things. When you change an immigration rule, it has a ripple effect across several departments and agencies, federally and provincially. Only the Department of Justice at this point has a program definition that properly encapsulates the capability to study this issue further.
In that connection, my recommendation is this: Immigration Canada has to loosen up on its data policy. There is a written CIC data management policy that denies external departments such as Justice from accessing current information. Even this committee is denied access to current information. The written guideline says this committee shall not receive current data from CIC. Only the minister and CIC officials are entitled to that, which I find odd, given that the mandate of this committee is to oversee CIC. How can CIC withhold current information?
Leaving that aside, I hope CIC will allow for data sharing of the valuable information it possesses from information gleaned from the ground, the field, with other partners such as the CBSA or Justice or other interested parties.
Mr. Chair, my eight minutes.