Citizenship and Immigration committee  What kinds of demographic issues...?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If I understand you correctly, Madame, the demographic question you're asking is this. Canadians are getting older. They're living longer. We're going to have more older people. Who is going to provide the workforce to provide the taxes to support the social services for the older people?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't think I can generalize on that. Countries with very different cultural backgrounds sometimes put the surname first; even some western countries, like Hungary. My wife's surname when she was single was the first name, yet she is addressed by her last name as a first name.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, that can be a problem. I lived in Syria, and Arabic names are sometimes transcribed with different vowels, in particular, because Arabic vowels fall somewhere in between English vowels and vice versa. So yes, in that sense, that could be an issue. If you simply don't identify someone because their names have been spelled differently in two different situations, that's an issue of another kind, not so much cultural sensitivity as a security risk.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Certainly I mentioned Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there are others where there are significant security problems or potential terrorist problems. That doesn't mean those are the only ones. You might get a terrorist supporter coming in through a completely different route.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It may be true. I must say that I haven't come across that particular one. We do have a lot of people coming in from the States, though, and one of the problems we face is that we get a lot of what are called offshore applications, where somebody, let's say from China, applies in Buffalo, and we may not have the expertise at those posts that our staff would have in China.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It would allow the interviewer to at least ask some questions about some of the qualifications. If you thought you had fraudulent documents, that would not completely solve that problem. You'd still have to go out and check on those documents with the institute that issued them.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would hope there wouldn't be a major delay, because the person who's making the application is going to come into the embassy anyway. But the costs would be considerable if you had enough Canada-based staff to do this. I don't know what the current figure is. I think it's about $400,000 a year to keep a Canada-based staff overseas, rent a house for them, have their family there, with maybe some of them going to school in Canada.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  A good interview might take an hour or two. No, I don't think it would. We're already facing a problem of wait times because of the sheer volume of people applying. We're not doing things as quickly as we'd like to and should be doing. That's an issue in itself. I don't think the interview is going to take that long, an hour or two, so I don't think it will have much impact on the wait time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Could you repeat that, please?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There were certain periods when a lot of terrorist supporters came in, which I mentioned, and I think we should have been considering that more carefully. Terrorist problems are relatively recent, though; they have only come up in the last 25 years or so.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll have to try to refresh myself a bit, but I can pretty well recall what my recommendations were. They were that we do have some security problems; we should be checking people more carefully. We should also be looking at communities where there's more of a risk than in other communities to see why there is a risk.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, that would be one of the solutions to this problem. Are you talking about stopping people on security grounds or just stopping refugee claimants in general?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Those are two separate issues. The fraudulent documents more often than not relate to people's academic qualifications or financial situation rather than security. The security issues are somewhat different in that they relate to whether they are going to be a threat to national security or some related area.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, 25 at the time was a considerable number. It's a minuscule part of the total flow, and I want to make that clear. Most refugee claimants are not criminals or terrorist supporters. I did give the example also that—