In my experience, it doesn't prevent people from wanting to come to Canada. It just creates hardship, in terms of separation, for them once they are here. There are 13 settlement agencies across New Brunswick. They work with economic immigrants, family-class immigrants, and refugees. Their experience is that the stress, the mental health impacts, and the overall social integration of newcomers is impacted negatively due to separation from family members.
So if we as a country are looking to get the best and the brightest to address our labour market gaps, to help us grow our economy, to start new businesses, we should be recognizing that those people have family connections, and their families are important to writing that Canadian story, to the fabric of our country and our communities. I think if that's the vision—that we want the best and the brightest—then we have to understand that they're going to want to bring their family members.
Furthermore, in terms of refugees, I want to applaud the government for the ambitious objective of bringing in 25,000 refugees and for meeting that objective. We worked very hard in New Brunswick on this, to collectively make it a success. These individuals are now very preoccupied with the fact that many of them have family in inhospitable and unsafe environments. And so on a daily basis—three, four, five, or six times a day—they're getting contacted by their family members, and this is weighing down on them.
So family class in terms of family reunification for people who arrive as refugees is part and parcel of the original objective that we had as a humanitarian undertaking. Bringing in their family members is part of the undertaking, part of the follow-through in terms of the humanitarian commitment that we made as a government.
For both of those reasons, I think it's important that we look at a quota system, and whether a quota system makes sense, or whether we want to define very clear eligibility criteria for those—