Mr. Chair, when the minister was talking about how proud he was to be a minister and how he had been a naturalized Canadian, I was reminded of the experience of Michael Starr, who was the first cabinet minister who was not from a French or British background in Canada. He was actually from my home town of Oshawa, Ontario. He was the minister of labour in the Diefenbaker government.
My family were immigrants to Canada. I know how proud they were of the fact that Mr. Starr was made a cabinet minister, the first immigrant cabinet minister in the sense of having a non-British or non-French background. It was indeed something that was very important to many people in Oshawa and across Canada.
We have often heard that the government is committed to an annual target for immigration of 1% of the population. We are still nowhere near that. We are almost 100,000 short of that almost every year. Yet, we keep hearing that number of 1% bandied around. Does the government have any intention of bringing in a recommendation that would get us toward its often stated target of 1% of the population for immigration?