Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Chair, I would say very simply that the streams are actually independent. The size of the refugee class will depend on two key things. One is the number of refugees we settle, what we call government-assisted refugees, from overseas. They were the Nepalese and the Iraqis I referenced.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's correct, yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. I should say, Chair, that we don't speak for the Immigration and Refugee Board. We'll tell you what we know in a general way; you may want to ask them directly. But basically, they're processing cases largely on a chronological basis, by way of date of application.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Making a claim.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The majority of those would have made a claim when they arrived in Canada at the border. It could have been at an airport or it could have been at a land border. Depending on the country of origin, it tends to vary quite a bit. As an example, we've had historically a lot of claims from Mexico, and they have been from a combination of people who are already here in Canada, perhaps working, and others who simply showed up at the border, land or air.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's correct.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I do. Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to thank you again for inviting us here on the annual report to Parliament for 2010. As committee members will know, Canada has one of the most ambitious immigration programs in the world. The 2011 levels plan is broadly consistent with the 2009 and 2010 plans.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Chair. I can elaborate a bit further on some of the other things we're doing. We've noted that we did publish a service declaration this spring. We also published the first set of service standards on exemptions for labour market opinions, on family class sponsorships, new permanent resident cards, and grants and contributions.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Over the longer term, as I noted earlier, GCMS will allow us to shift our workload around our network and sort out the most efficient way to do each step in the process and what is the local value added that we would have from a mission versus what might be done centrally here in Canada, in a very efficient way with very significant economies of scale.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, that's the case, Mr. Chair.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly we can do that, Chair. There were different categories we were dealing with. Some of the cases that were in our system were before the earthquake and then after the earthquake, and then there were the Quebec special measures on top of that. We can speak to those different categories.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly. Chair, probably the biggest single factor for us as a department on the permanent immigration side is that, by and large, we do not control intake in terms of the number of applications to our programs, whereas on the output side, our annual levels plan determines how many people we will actually admit.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Chair, the global case management system is replacing a number of what we would call legacy systems. As members probably know, historically we have been a very paper-based system, in terms of the way we deal with files, and if you visit some of the missions around the world, you will see this enormous amount of paper, once you get inside the working part of the embassy.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay. One part of the case can be done in one part of the world and another in another part of the world. It's a big step forward.