Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Sandra Harder. I'm the director general for strategic policy at Citizenship and Immigration. I'm joined by my colleague David Manicom, Cam Carruthers from HRSDC, and Tamara Miller from Finance. I'm going to make some opening remarks about four p

Finance committee  Yes, there were a number of different alternatives that were looked at before this decision was taken, and as you know, people who are affected by this provision will be able to resubmit their application should they so choose. In doing so, they would be much more likely to recei

Finance committee  Absolutely, they can.

Finance committee  Let me just address your first issue around resources, and if we had applied more resources would that have made a difference.

Finance committee  The answer to that is actually that the output is always constrained by the immigration levels plan, so it's not necessarily a question of resources. It's a question of the amount of room that's in the national immigration levels plan, so that's one. Your second question I thin

Finance committee  These provisions apply to the federal skilled worker program, not to the temporary foreign worker program.

Finance committee  That's really not related to these provisions at all. The temporary foreign worker program is a very large program. It includes temporary foreign workers. It can include students. It can include visitors. So it's quite a large program, but none of the provisions that are outlined

Finance committee  Well, as you know, because these are provisions in the budget act, they've only been made public since the introduction of Bill C-38. I guess there is an expectation that some people who have been in the federal skilled worker backlog for some time could be disappointed, and we c

Finance committee  Do you want to take that, David?

Finance committee  One of the things I would respond to on that is that there is a view that temporary foreign workers should be a complement to the Canadian labour market, not a substitute. It's that notion of where temporary foreign workers are required and under conditions where they're required

Finance committee  We did legal analysis at the time we were looking at this particular provision, and there was a legal risk analysis done. Certainly it's one of the considerations that gets fed into policy development and legislative development. So, yes, it was taken into consideration, but ther

Finance committee  These particular changes? I would say that the genesis of a lot of the changes that feed into how we're dealing with the backlog is at least 10 years old, definitely.

Finance committee  This, I would say, is a provision that has been examined in the context of trying to deal with a better management of our application intake over a number of years, absolutely.

Finance committee  It's the decision of the government as to how to proceed, there's no question about that. There is also a monetary feature attached to this because refunding those applications is $130 million, which is part of the budget bill.

Finance committee  Are you speaking just with respect to these provisions?