Citizenship and Immigration committee  Maybe I can start and Nicole can supplement. Again, with respect to adoptions, as you know, there are two approval processes. One is the domestic approval process, which is really run by the province, and the second one is the international one, which is done on our immigration

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We do the best predictions we can based upon the data we have, the information in terms of numbers. There are some data gaps here. Again, when the previous Bill C-37 came into being, we had certain projections of volumes, because we have to do that from an operational perspecti

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What we can do is to go back and do a bit more digging to try to see what information is out there, to try to give the best information we have. We're happy to do that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You correctly noted that they are all countries with which we normally compare ourselves, so it is kind of interesting when there are divergent approaches. When we actually go through the detailed comparisons, sort of step by step and situation by situation, there is no really cl

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We don't have studies that are publicly available, but we have our own internal analysis. For example, the first generation in Canada tends to be one of the most open, in a sense; you don't actually have to do any registration. It's an automatic kind of thing. That is one area in

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Nicole, do we have any statistics on that? I haven't seen any.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There is a big advantage to keeping things simple, not only for us, as civil servants, but also for Canadians and those we serve. If we make the rules too complicated, we make it very hard for people to apply.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What I always find intriguing with these types of cases is how very different people's circumstances are. You have to take people's circumstances and so forth into account. As public servants, we try to come up with an approach that works for the majority of people but includes

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I haven't seen any good estimates. We have estimates in terms of the total number of Canadian expatriates abroad, which really come from the Asia-Pacific Foundation, of 2.8 million or something like that. But we don't really have a generational division of those figures, so it's

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Subsection 5(4) is the exception that allows you to make a special request for citizenship if you don't meet all the other criteria. We're not getting a very high demand under it.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In those special exemptions, the ones we use for some of the lost Canadians, for people who don't necessarily fall within all the various exceptions, it's almost a general exception that allows a case to be made and to go to the minister and the like.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There needs to be a demonstration in terms of hardship and service to the country. There are some special provisions there. Again, it's like an exception—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For this one, I think the current inventory is in the order of 150. So it's a relatively small number.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  When we say that they are deemed residents, it's really from a tax law perspective. That's really the connection. As always, with the different kinds of laws and legislation we have, the interplay becomes a bit complex. So it doesn't necessarily automatically translate in terms o

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The current legislation sets out a safeguard in terms of the international adoption process, which involves verifying that the family in Canada is able to care for the child and ensuring that the process respects all laws in the home country, as well as international adoption sta