Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I have three areas of questions.
First, just to tee off, on the $45 million or $46 million to increase the numbers for parents and grandparents to 10,000 in the modelling, does that modelling include also the contributions that those parents and grandparents would bring economically? That is to say, aside from the cost for you to process, what is the contribution back to our economy, be it by way of the parent being able to get out into the workforce or whatever the case may be? I think that's an important part to include in the modelling as well.
I want to move on to my other question related to the live-in care workers, which is the caregiver program, because there has been a shift related to that question. Ms. Snow actually responded on the question to committee members to say that particularly in Manila, the staff consistently meets their levels as they are determined by the department, so it speaks well to this to say that people are working hard and meeting those levels. When we got the response back to say what the wait times are, they are 17 months on average, and we're at 76 months for Manila; that is to say, it is 6.3 years in addition to the two years that they are required to work before they can even make an application. That's 8.3 years. By any stretch of the imagination, reuniting families in the timeframe of 8.3 years is not a good timeframe.
To that end, I'm really interested in understanding what the numbers are for the levels, the targets that are allocated for this stream. I don't know if I can get those numbers, because related to that I got a response back when I tried to get the target numbers for all the different countries for parent and grandparent reunification, and that response said, “The department cannot release office-specific targets publicly.” Then it cited the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act.
If we cannot get the information for this year because it's government operations, can I then get the numbers for last year? I want to get a sense of what those targets are, because that builds into the delays, and where the country of origin is in terms of those delays, which will give us a sense of the lay of the land.
Those are the three areas that I would love to get answers for. It sounds like an undertaking, Mr. Chair. I will preface this to say that if this is an undertaking for which I cannot get an answer at this meeting, even if I can't get it for the committee's report—and I don't want to impede the work of the report any further—I would still love to get the answer at some point just so I get a better understanding of the situation.