Thank you, Minister.
Thank you, Mr. Whelan.
We heard testimony earlier in terms of how much it costs. The average of about $7,000 is the threshold for medical inadmissibility, that being what an average Canadian expends in a year on medical expenses. When we actually take 170,000, the number Mr. Whelan and I are using—when you take out refugees and you take out family class immigrants, who are exempt already, it's approximately 170,000—it's only 900 people. And for those 900 people, if they were admitted, the average would actually be $7,000. So we are not pushing the average higher because, as Canadians, we have the same diseases, same illnesses, and same disabilities. Taking all of that into consideration, our expenses are $7,000. In fact right now we're actually probably lowering the average artificially by excluding them.
I would say that initially I thought it was a good policy, because that would perhaps be a big burden on Canadians, but then I looked back—and I don't want to equate it to this—and it's no different from the slave trade, in which only those selected as the strongest and the most able-bodied were brought from Africa. It's not that that whole policy is good at all, but I'm saying it is akin to discriminating when we're picking only people who are healthy, fully functioning, with no intellectual disabilities and no physical disabilities. I think as a country, when we look at the cost, even if it was double the average per person, we'd be looking at such a small number. Nine hundred times $7,000 is $6.3 million. Even if you doubled that, it would still be only $12 million or $13 million. If you triple that it's still an inconsequential number compared to overall immigration. I'd like to express my opinion on that, and I want to share that with you, Minister.
Second, the committee has heard from witnesses who applied for permanent residency status in Canada, many of whom have been refused based on medical inadmissibility. What's the IRCC doing to mitigate those challenges related to medical inadmissibility faced by individuals who are already in Canada and who cannot get permanent residency because of one family member? We have heard so far that of those who have applied with a plan of mitigation, very, very few have been accepted. We've also heard some evidence that the expenses used to calculate their inadmissibility are not the ones that are actually used. For example, they're using branded drugs, when in fact our medical—