Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, that's correct.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Chair, one of the challenges has always been focusing our efforts in working with the international community, with the UN, the UNHCR, when dealing with a lot of very protracted refugee situations around the world. I mentioned Nepal and the Bhutanese refugees. Yes, that requires a lot of effort, but we feel it's a really critical part of what we do in the refugee determination program, and that is our preferred route for resettling refugees from around the world.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's what we have now, so we have about 10 years' worth in our current backlog of applications for parents and grandparents. I mentioned the federal skilled workers earlier, where we add 640,000. So that is our dilemma. We have large numbers of applications trying to get through a very small—if I can put it this way—levels plan tube.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are three options. First, there's the status quo: we just keep going. And you're quite right, processing times will probably continue to lengthen, given the demand. Second, the government could look at a larger immigration target overall. We're at this range of 240,000 to 265,000.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Fundamentally, we are wrestling with the number of applications at each mission. And missions are given specific targets in terms of their “share” of the overall target. So if there are a lot more applications in one mission, they're going to develop more of a queue. This is where GCMS can help us.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, it is very difficult to say. We don't really know. Certainly we would know about something like a big ship arrival. We didn't have any of those occurrences in 2009. To what extent we were dealing with organized arrivals it's very difficult to tell, but we know they go on.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It is a very difficult movement and set of issues to get a handle on. We work with the RCMP and CSIS on measures designed to combat trafficking and human smuggling, but this is a very difficult group to go after. We try to work through those agencies with other countries to get local law enforcement cooperation, and so on.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is one of the dilemmas we have in the immigration program. The number of applications for parents and grandparents is about 145,000. That's a large number.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Historically the acceptance rate at the IRB has been around 42%.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, I will start to answer the question, but perhaps Mr. Linklater could help me later on. I think the key issue, Chair, has been whether the government, whether Parliament, is concerned about the way people might arrive in Canada to claim asylum, particularly with the involvement of human smugglers and traffickers.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's hard to say. Certainly marine arrivals have been unusual. They've happened before. There were the Chinese boat arrivals in 1999, I believe. It's not that common, but it has happened from time to time. The worry is that you start to create an incentive for those things to happen and you get a real wave of those occurrences.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In 2009. With regard to the protected persons in Canada, the range of 7,000 to 9,000 is what is coming through the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. In the document—sorry, I'll just make sure I've got the same reference here—in terms of the 2010 plan—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, Chair. I can clarify that. The backlog I'm referring to in terms of the significant reduction involved the cases we had on file prior to the implementation of the first set of ministerial instructions. It did not apply to the more restricted list of occupations, so they were processed.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Basically, by processing the cases. Obviously some were accepted and some were not, in terms of whether they met what was required under the points system.