Mr. Chair, the member is right and I accept those figures. The challenge for us is not all immigration. I gave an indication earlier that this department is becoming much more a recruiter. It is becoming much more proactive and less of an administrative department even though it still needs to address the administrative requirements.
The reason it is not all citizenship and immigration is because those figures are also alarm bells for all government departments. They must understand the policy implications that would flow from those figures.
For example, provincial education departments around the country must be thinking about how they can meet these particular targets. If 70% of all new jobs created in the next five years are going to require post-secondary education and/or training, then why is it that we tolerate an early high school dropout rate that hovers around the 30% mark? If only 6% of all new jobs within five years are going to require less than a high school diploma, how can we tolerate the built-in structural unemployment that must be created when we have 6% of the jobs being sought after by 30% of the population? Of the 70% only 41% actually have post-secondary education.
Those challenges go across government departments and do not apply just to us. As I indicated earlier, one of my six priority items is to bring as many young men and women into our system through international student visas, so that we have the advantage of their desire and ambition to grow academically, materially and economically here in Canada.