Finance committee  It is $550 per adult and I believe $125 per child.

Finance committee  We need to make a distinction between provincial responsibilities for enforcing labour code violations; that's a provincial responsibility. With regard to employers respecting their undertakings, when they hire an employee under the temporary foreign workers program, the commitments they make with regard to salaries and so forth—Cam may wish to also comment—the provisions that he spoke to will give the government clearer authority to monitor and audit employers to ensure that they are complying with the obligations they made.

Finance committee  The ability of the immigration department is really with regard to our regulation of consultants. We've recently strengthened our legislative provisions with regard to unscrupulous consultants. Also, many provinces have provincial law with regard to whether or not employers can charge fees—transportation fees and so forth—to the employees coming to Canada.

Finance committee  There are no changes envisaged at this time with regard to agriculture or temporary foreign labour. There are no provisions in the budget or other policy plans to make any changes to that at this time.

Finance committee  For many years it has been the policy with regard to temporary foreign workers that Canadian employers must attempt to employ Canadians first. When they are unable to locate Canadian workers, then they make an application for labour market opinion at HRSDC, who makes the decision as to whether or not the employer has made reasonable efforts to hire a Canadian first.

Finance committee  No.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd put it a little bit the other way. We have the largest family class program in the world. We issue visitor visas to parents who are in process all the time; it's absolutely routine. As a matter of fact, if they're in process, they've generally already demonstrated that they have the financial capability to sponsor, so our officers issue five-year multiple entry visas to a lot of these cases.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We don't require officers to spend their entire career in India, for example, though we certainly have some who would like to do that. It's a fascinating country. We have a local training program for new officers, where they learn a great deal about local marriage law, which is very complicated in India, as well as customs, and ways of identifying problematic cases so we can decide which cases to interview.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In New Delhi, we answer them almost always within 24 to 48 hours. We do in the order of 5,000 to 6,000 a year. But that number is actually dropping. We hope that our MP newsletter has helped with that, and also the fact that our family class priority processing time has remained quite quick, as well as our visitor visa processing times.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd probably focus more on process efficiencies and therefore better use of tax dollars than directly reducing processing times--although it should, of course, over time achieve that as well. It is early days. We're learning all of its capacities. It has many wonderful capacities that will also help us detect fraud, triage cases better, have better background information on applicants and companies and inviters and schools and so forth that will help us do our work more intelligently.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Officers in Delhi have a main duty and a back-up duty. All the officers are cross-trained, so we can move resources on a daily and weekly basis into the temporary resident unit to make sure we are always current on our temporary resident/visiting processing times. It's our conviction that in the end that preserves more resources for the permanent resident processing because it keeps us as efficient as possible.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This program was launched two and a half years ago in New Delhi. We are interested in those companies that have proven their reliability in the past and that have obtained a very high approval rate based on very reliable applications. We established direct links with these businesses, a contact point in order to avoid receiving fraudulent letters of invitation.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Generally speaking, long wait times are not the result of processing admissions. Long wait times are generated when the volume of applications received is larger than the targets we are permitted to issue. That is for the overwhelming majority of wait times at missions abroad. It is certainly true that, in addition to that, a certain number of applications have fraudulent documentation on them and generate additional processing time, and particularly in the parents and grandparents category, medical complications, particularly active tuberculosis, can lead to significant processing times.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We issued 102% of our visa target. Most of the overage was due to achieving 109% of the target for priority family class spouses, where our policy globally is to process as many as we can and as fast as we can, so as not to keep immediate family members apart. Aside from our family class priority program, we met our target at 100.1% or 100.2%, if memory serves.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that's perhaps a question for my minister, sir.