Thank you, Madam Chair.
I travelled around the country for two years with the finance committee, so I'm very familiar with the atmosphere.
Most fundamentally, I welcome public hearings, as we are having now, on the design of our immigration policy. I hope it will get the deserved publicity and discussion in Parliament that have been needed.
On a personal note, despite my numerous academic publications in the field of immigration economics, I was never asked to participate in the discussions around the setting of official immigration targets and selection criteria, nor was I ever asked, as a member of Parliament from 1993 to 1997, to vote on these issues. Only once did the minister tell me privately to keep up my research and publications and hold his feet to the fire.
I believe that in the greatest need of change are policies determining the number and selection criteria of temporary residents who are admitted to work or study in Canada. Foreigners who fill seasonal or temporary labour shortages in the economy should be admitted in numbers at frequent, regular intervals set by a parliamentary committee.
There should be no foreign students attending elementary and secondary schools. They do not benefit Canada. They burden our schools' resources. Foreign students should be admitted to attend Canadian colleges, universities and graduate schools. They bring valuable benefits to the institutions and the economy, especially to the extent that they pay tuition. Foreign students who have completed degrees at these institutions should no longer be deferred candidates for permanent resident status. The government should adopt a policy to ensure that temporary workers and students leave Canada after their visas have expired.
On a separate issue, parents and grandparents should be granted only visitor super visas, which was practised before the changes initiated by the government in 2016. It makes eminent sense. If a foreigner does not want to come without his parents, he should just not come.
The system dealing with asylum seekers needs to be reformed, possibly fundamentally, much as it is in other western democracies. Such reforms may include the development of ways in which the backlog of applications for refugee status is reduced. I'm fully aware that this is one of the most difficult problems our foreign policy faces.
There are no easy solutions. There are trade-offs that involve fundamental human values, such as the suffering of immigrants, but also the suffering of Canadians who find their housing, access to medical care—