Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's up to us to make the decision regarding eligibility. That also includes the source of funds. The documentation is already there, with the application. Sometimes we request the notes of the people at the Quebec office so that we can see what they've determined with regard to

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We do it from a somewhat different point of view, but we're indeed the ones who make the decision regarding eligibility. It's more a matter of the criminal aspect than of the source of the funds.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Off the top of my head, I can say that last year it was fewer than 200. Of those, I don't know statistically how many were actually from Taiwanese, but I would say very few. It was probably about 160 out of 27,000 applications--less than half a per cent.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Generally speaking, it was fraud. Sometimes you would get surprising situations. We did a quality assurance exercise in the past summer on Taiwanese applicants. Out of basically just over a hundred cases, we had one incidence of confirmed fraud where the person provided fraudulen

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can talk about part of the process. Basically, what occurred is what we call the technical visit. The visit actually happened before my arrival at the mission, but they looked at a number of factors, as you mentioned--refusal rates, enforcement rates, and refugee claim rates.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are three general steps we take. First, we have built familiarity with a lot of the documents we see from the Philippines--and we are talking about the Philippines. We're talking primarily about two type of things: education documents, and to a lesser extent work experience

Citizenship and Immigration committee  To answer your first question, the primary advantage is that the applicants don't have to see us. They can proceed directly to Canada and there's less friction in their movements. Additionally, if it's a family they're not spending $400 Canadian to get the visas. Certainly we'r

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would say that doesn't often happen now. There are of course some situations where that occurs, but Quebec officers generally do a good job and the applications we receive contain the information we need. I would say we don't very often request any new information.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The first answer is that the notional target of five was immediately modified to reflect what we actually have in inventory. Having said that, new applications still come in. At the present time what we have in inventory at any stage of process of the FC4 cases is 24 cases. That

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Compared to some previous years, the statistics are a bit deceiving. The processing times for our FC movement have actually been generally pretty good. Again, we've been processing more than have been coming in. Do you remember when I said—maybe you weren't here—the application

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, that's correct.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Wait times are minimal for investors. We may have to lower the targets. That's been done in the past.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In 2010, we approved 21 applications, whereas we had received 38.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's just a question of receipt of applications. We stopped receiving federal investor applications in June, I believe. The Quebec investor applications continued to arrive until August or September. In fact, the people decided to file their applications in Quebec, not elsewhere.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of the immigrant applications, there's been a long-standing decline. If you look at the numbers out of Taipei--or at least from Taiwan--in the mid- to late-1990s, it was around 12,000 or 13,000 immigrants a year. This has, as you mentioned, declined significantly and ste