Thank you very much, Chair.
If I could, I just want to pick up on something Mr. Lee said in his opening remarks and emphasize the amount of constituency time spent on all matters of immigration right now. It is between 70% and 80% of the workload of constituency staff right now. At some point, we have to do something about this. It's unfair to the people who need the service because our staff have varying degrees of education, and we don't hire or pay for staff of the status needed to provide the kind of legal advice that's ultimately given. Whether or not someone's application gets moved along more quickly should not be determined by whether or not they were lucky enough to go to an office of someone like Mr. Lee, who has been elected for 25 years, or somebody in office for three months who doesn't even have an e-mail system in place, let alone is able to deal with complicated applications.
So I'm hoping that someday we'll do what was done in Ontario with workers' compensation. The same thing happened there with workers' compensation, as the workload on that got so big that members were actually going to appeal tribunals because there was no one else to help. It was taking up hours and days of MPPs' time. So they set up separate institutions, separate centres of advice, for both employers and employees on WCB matters so that the MPP's office would initially take it to a certain point and then hand it over to experts, who could pick it up and run with it. The system, for the most part, works well and achieved the goal of taking that workload out of the constituency offices, to let those offices deal with the myriad of other things that come into a provincial member's office.
I just put this idea out there for my colleagues. At some point, we have to get away from our constituency offices evolving into de facto sub-regional immigration offices. That's what they've become, and it's a huge problem. At some point, we have to come to grips with this.
Second, notwithstanding my friend Mr. Young's cheerleading for “team government”, the reality is that the backlog is still where it was 10 years ago. The AG said this morning it could take between eight and 25 years to get caught up; and as to the new process, we've already heard again from the AG that she has some concerns that we may be developing a systemic backlog down the road, if I'm not misinterpreting what she said. She's nodding, yes, that is indeed the point she made.
So this report is not glowing. There is some improvement being made, but by no means should anyone believe it's some fantastic solution, that once we passed the 2008 deadline, when the ministerial instructions came in, life was all hearts and flowers versus being awful before that. The situation is nowhere near that clean.
My last question, if I have time to slip it in, deals with the really important issue on page 38 of the Auditor General's report, the recognition of foreign credentials. It has become an ugly cliché in Canada that we have the smartest cab drivers in the world. It's an honourable profession, and so is delivering pizzas when you need to make a buck to put money on the table, but we can't afford to have doctors and engineers driving cabs, and the reason is they don't have recognition of their foreign credentials. I see a chart here indicating that we've spent $125 million in seven or eight years and the problem has not become any better.
What exactly are we going to do and when are we going to do something effective to put these new Canadians to work doing the jobs we need them to do, like providing health care?