Citizenship and Immigration committee  The last slide, to finish and open up for your questions, gives you statistics of what we managed to do in 2010. On the top left side, under the levels plan, are the numbers of permanent residents we brought in to Canada. You will be aware that we actually exceeded our range last year and ended up with just over 280,000 permanent residents.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have been bringing to Canada 240,000 to 265,000 people a year for the last several years. What we like to do is have people move down the path towards becoming citizens. We have a very high take-up rate among our permanent residents. About 85% of people who come as permanent residents eventually apply to become citizens of Canada.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We do have, obviously, a list of countries where visitor visas are required for individuals, and many others where folks don't need a visitor visa to come to Canada. What happens in that set of circumstances, for people who do require a temporary resident visa, is they make the application overseas, now sometimes through those visa application centres, and the screening is done overseas to ensure that we have medical and admissibility screening, etc., in place and that the person is a bona fide visitor, that they actually will return to their country of origin at the end of their period of authorized stay.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  End to end.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, that's fine. If I could just give one example before we move on to how we're leveraging the network, in China, for our temporary resident visa applications, there's a very high volume of business. What we're doing now, working in collaboration with visa application centres, is that every day, when people apply at the visa application centre, it's uploaded to Ottawa.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  On slide 2 you'll see what we have in terms of a global footprint in the full gamut of places where CIC delivers services. In a nutshell, we have seven regions that we work out of: the centralized processing region, the international region, and five domestic regions. We have 46 points of service in Canada and more than 90 overseas with different types of offices overseas.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. It does not include that type of financing, because the contribution agreement we have with certain organizations that put forward weak proposals and that will not receive funding will draw to a close at the end of March.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thanks very much for the question, Mr. Chair. What I would say in relation to this is that, first, with the call for proposals process, we have to recall the first principle: that it's merit-based and it's competitive. So we have service provider organizations that had the full opportunity to make their case on how they were going to serve the needs in a responsible manner--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  --and they had weak proposals, which meant that they weren't funded. Now, to get to the transition period--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  --certainly, the idea is that we are working with the organizations that we used to fund and that will no longer be funded by us in the next fiscal year, to manage that transition as they are winding down their operations, and to ensure that their clientele is served by new service provider organizations that are coming online or others that are in the same geographic area.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, what we know from the call for proposal process is that there was over $700 million requested...for our eventual pot of money of $346.5 million. Even for those organizations that put in strong proposals and had robust governance and management and so on and which we were confident could deliver the settlement services needed, the total of what they would have wanted to have was over $600 million.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much for the question, Mr. Chair. I'll speak to that, if I may. I spoke earlier about our principles about meeting immigrants' needs and responsible funding. More and more in the way in which we distribute the settlement funding across Canada, Citizenship and Immigration has moved to a call for proposals process, which is an open and transparent process with standards that are set out ahead of time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What I can say on this call for proposals process in Ontario is that just over 80% of the service provider organizations that we want to negotiate a contribution agreement with are folks that we have been funding already. So we see a stability in the sector. We see a capacity in the sector to deliver the needed services in the locations.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In response to the call for proposal process, over 450 organizations put in applications for proposals. In those proposals, yes, they put forward the services they wished to provide, the number of clients they would serve, the outcomes they would seek to support, how they were in line with the programming priorities of the department, etc.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm working my way up to that. What we're confident about is that there won't be a disruption in service to the clients in the greater Toronto area, because we have factored that in.