Thank you so much.
I'm delighted to be here, Mr. Chair and colleagues, with my highly qualified and decorated colleagues, because they are the real experts in the business of this department. They are Tony Matson; Catrina Tapley; my deputy minister, Anita Biguzs; and Dawn Edlund, who is the number two person in operations as associate assistant deputy minister.
I'm pleased to be here with these officials to present the main estimates for fiscal year 2014-15. Citizenship and Immigration has planned spending for this fiscal year totalling about $1.39 billion, an overall net decrease of $270 million compared with last year's main estimate funding levels.
Before anyone draws any sweeping conclusions from that decrease, keep in mind that I will come to that. There's a very simple explanation for it.
In my opening remarks today, l will highlight several of the significant funding increases and decreases in our main estimates. The most significant investment of the year is $45.5 million in funding to allow the department to address increased application volumes in the citizenship and temporary resident lines of business. You will recall that these were initiatives in previous iterations of Canada's economic action plan to meet a growing need, with more permanent residents than ever applying for citizenship and more people from around the world visiting Canada than ever before. A portion of the new funding will be used to add processing capacity to keep pace with growth in the temporary resident line of business, particularly in key markets such as China, India, and Brazil, where most of the growth is anticipated.
On the citizenship side, which we've been discussing quite a lot lately, our government is committed to timely service even as we face record numbers of applications due to the highest sustained levels of immigration in Canadian history over the past eight years.