Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's an honour to be here today and to be able to talk to you about immigration issues. The backlog is an important issue, but it's not the main important issue. It's really a symptom of an immigration policy in Canada that wasn't working and was

Citizenship and Immigration committee  One more minute? Okay, I won't get into this.... Herb and I did an estimate of the cost of immigration. If you apply our number to this backlog you get a cost of $6 billion a year, if you allow all these people in. Also, you can calculate, based on the Statistics Canada data, th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The problem in immigration is that the performance of immigrants has deteriorated over time, and this reflects the performance of both family class and economic immigrants, not to mention refugees. The government has been trying to deal with the whole issue of selecting the best

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Given that the current level seems to be too high, judging from the performance of the immigrants, raising it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. If you raise the limit, given the bureaucratic approach we have to immigration policy, what it means is that we will bring in more im

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You won't know whether it's a wise policy or not until 2015 or 2020, when you see how the immigrants have done.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Given that they've abandoned the long-form census, you're not even going to have the information now.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I do have a comment. If the problem is in five years, you're not talking about the demographic impact. What you're talking about now is that the labour force will stop growing in five years. That doesn't mean you need to take in more immigrants now; that just exacerbates the prob

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the problem is that the types of industries you're talking about, where you bring in a large number of people and generally from similar places, are not the industries of the future. These are usually the industries of the past and are having trouble attracting labour.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  All work contributes to the GDP of our country. The question is, which type of work contributes the most?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Could I just add something? I think it is important that the federal government have a role there. I think one of the issues that need to be addressed is getting pre-clearance on credentials before people come here so there isn't the problem that many people have of being admitt

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think you have a very good point. The situation was unsustainable under the old act where you had the “shall” clause that said they had to process all of these applications. The way they set it up with the points, if you got a minimum score, you were accepted. So the immigratio

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It would be much better.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the government spending on resettlement recognizes the fact that over many years many immigrants have been admitted without language skills, without job skills, without knowing how to get a job. We have to spend this money: these people are here; they're Canadians now. We

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think you are raising a very important point. It is absolutely necessary to reduce the delays in processing applications.