Thank you. It's an honour and a pleasure to be appearing before the committee. I'll try to use the seven minutes wisely.
First, to save time, I would draw again the committee's attention to the submissions of the Canadian Bar Association. I support and endorse every recommendation made therein.
Today, I'd like to draw attention to just three things.
The first is money. This may be the appropriate venue to illuminate a way of assisting the financing of family reunification processing. I'll just take a brief couple of minutes to illustrate.
In Canada, we receive, in a year, about 1.5 million visitor applications, about 300,000 study permit applications, 400,000 work permit applications, half a million PR cards applications, and about a quarter of a million citizenship applications. These are the volumes—about three million applications a year. Well, there is a design flaw. When the department created its information technology system to intake applications, including family reunification applications, what happened was that the designers used as a model the old paper-based forms—one form for a visitor visa application, another for study, and another for work. Guess what? We are completing....
Oh, I'm sorry about that. Can you hear me?