Citizenship and Immigration committee  I couldn't really give you any other logical reasons. There are permanent residents and temporary residents. With regard to temporary residents, all applications from people who hadn't filed an application at that time must normally be filed outside Canada. That provision is stil

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I must admit that's more a political than an operational question. When the act was amended in 2001, we essentially followed what had been done under the previous act. At that time, all the applications had to be filed outside Canada, except those from refugees. The exceptions Mr

Citizenship and Immigration committee  First, thank you very much for the invitation, Mr. Chair. I'd like to introduce to you Burke Thornton and Catherine Bailey, who are from our office in Buffalo. Burke is the area director responsible for all the U.S. mission. He is also responsible for the office in the Caribbean

Citizenship and Immigration committee  First, I should clarify. As I think I mentioned last time, we do changes during the year, especially at the beginning of the year. Just in the parent and grandparents, we did 17 changes between January 6 to the one that we did on January 31. I have to check, but we have the new t

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The minister has no impact on the individual target. The final decision on the target, so far, is done. Some of the analysts working for me do the tweaking, as we call it; otherwise, it's my decision.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What I mean—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I am not sure what you are referring to as a second medical examination.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Jim can correct me, but in the vast majority of cases the first one does not expire, because we give the medical instructions at the end of the process, which means normally they don't expire. It doesn't mean that there will be no further medicals for, let's say, TB, that this wi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Maybe one thing I could add is that the majority of the cases that are going to be finalized this year are people who applied in 2008, so it cannot be five years, because they applied three years ago. We look at the age when people apply. It gives us a bit of an idea, but it's ve

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If we did it at the beginning, we would have to do it a second time at the cost of the client, and with no use for it really.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I won't go into details; I'll just mention my colleagues who are there. Jim Versteegh is the immigration program manager in Hong Kong, and Angela Gawel is the deputy program manager of the same office. We also have two of the team leaders: Lorie Jane Turner, who is the economic i

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't have it with me, but the information you provided is incorrect. We approve 80% of the applications globally. It varies from country to country. In China it is over 80%. In the case of India it was roughly 76% or 77% last year. It varies from country to country, but the a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I could answer that. It's a combination of a number of indicators. That's a very strong one. Once the refusal rate is below 3% or 4%--don't quote me on that, but it's something in that range--that's one of the factors. We could provide the information from our policy secto

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Statistics Canada publishes those statistics on a regular basis on the number of visitors from a particular country. In the case of Taiwan, we were issuing long-term multiple entry visas so the same visitor could come with the same visa a number of times. This data is not accumul