Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I really appreciate the opportunity to participate today.
To make myself useful, I'll try to bring some data that provides a bit of background and context and speaks to what's happening and where we might want to move going forward.
In a way, reallocation is already happening. According to Statistics Canada, the proportion of asylum seekers has been growing a lot faster in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. It's growing everywhere in Ontario. The growth from the third quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2026 was 179%, or something like that. There's significant growth in the refugee population, but in those provinces—New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Manitoba—the growth has been much faster. They're small numbers when you look at them as raw numbers, but it's a trend that is steady and persistent. Perhaps it's worth trying to understand why that's happening and to see if we can encourage it and make it grow.
We also have data tracking tax filers from their postadmission years—that is, the five or six years after they're admitted as permanent residents—and in which province they file their taxes. I don't know how much income they report—I wouldn't have access to that, obviously—but I know in which province they're filing their taxes.
We see that there is stability, by and large. As a predictor of how refugee and then permanent resident populations will move, for most provinces, 80% or so will stay in the province of admission. There isn't a lot of mobility. There are exceptions, and when there are exceptions, they tend to move to Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia. That really echoes how interprovincial migration happens in the population in general. They tend to move away from Quebec. If there's any large movement away from a province, it's from Quebec. Again, that isn't directly relevant to what we're talking about here today, but perhaps that behaviour is a predictor of how populations move in the country.
Mr. Jacques reported the extent of the refugee population within homeless shelters in Peel a few years ago, at least. I have data. The most recently available data from the City of Toronto from the first quarter of 2026 is that in Toronto, where they apparently have not separated out the two populations in the municipal shelters, the refugee population makes up 39% of the beds in Toronto shelters. That is unsustainable. Aside from the cost, it is clearly pushing local homeless people out of shelters. There is obviously federal money coming in to support the system to some degree, but I don't know if money is the solution there. There is a drain on the system.
In general, I think we could all agree—I think it's obvious—that the underlying base problem that's driving these stresses is the backlog of IRB decisions. There are 500,000 people waiting in the system for a resolution to their applications, and there's no mathematical way that the IRB members could ever process them in a meaningful period of time. For context, in 2025, there were 395 active IRB members. By “active”, the reporting I saw said anybody who's delivered 20 or more decisions in the past year is considered active, so there are only 395 active members.
It's not possible for them to process...so you want to triage. There are two triage approaches we might use. One is speeding up credential recognition. All provinces and the federal government have stood behind the idea of allowing foreign professionals in high-need areas to get in quickly. This is a great way to do that. Two is integrating AI models with human review so that you can quickly flag obvious decisions—this applicant will definitely come in, but that applicant would definitely be rejected—for human review.
Thank you.