Mr. Chair, I think we are all beginning to get an appreciation of how broad is the breadth of the application of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Yes, we are very much engaged with Industry Canada and the tourism commission in order to ensure that we are part and parcel of any plans they might have.
As an example, the member will know that for the Prime Minister's recent visit to China, which resulted in China indicating Canada as a destination of choice, by some estimates it will probably result in between 70,000 and 150,000 additional tourists from China alone coming to Canada on an annual basis. This means that we have had to put greater resources into dealing with many of the applications, not only from China but from elsewhere.
To answer the member's question as well with respect to security, certainly 9/11 did change people's perceptions about what happens in some parts of the world especially. What we needed to do was put in place the kind of official who would be sensitive to some of those concerns so that we could provide Canadians with a sense of comfort that those who come to visit here do come here as genuine tourists and do not come here because they want to do some malfeasance.
I am not sure that this is accounted for greatly in the backlog, but we are looking at some of the structural or framed developments in each of these refusals so that we can identify them. For example, among one particular community we are taking a look at those who come here for religious reasons to see what kinds of parameters we can put in place that go beyond the experience we currently have. We are trying to reassess the parameters under which our officials make decisions locally in the executing of these visas.
For example, the refusal rate also is dependent on another measure, which I indicated a moment ago. When we accord to parents and grandparents the opportunity to come here on multiple entry visas, we will eliminate a sizable number of refusals of visits to come here on the occasions of weddings and funerals and other celebrations.
For all of these together over the course of the last several months, the department has put together a plan that gives us an opportunity to individualize some of these issues, but I hearken and I hasten to add that we had some 850,000 accepted applications for tourist visas last year. That is an impressive number: 850,000 people who came through our missions just so they could come and visit and say, “What a lovely place, even in Vancouver”.