Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good-bye.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Let me speak to the matter of temporary residents. We have definitely streamlined this processing in various ways. We're working very closely with our service providers to make sure that the applications come in as complete as possible. We've done some training with our staff, to try to make the notes shorter or more concise and to gather the information more quickly.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, I guess if you had fewer applications to process, then the answer would be yes, you would have less work to do.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Fraud is a very difficult aspect of our work, and especially in a very large country. If you're working in a physically smaller country, maybe it's a bit easier to go and do some site visits. We have challenges, for sure, for this particular reason. We have dedicated staff, both Canada-based staff and locally engaged.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Do you mean work with Russian officials?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  To be honest, we don't do a lot of work with Russian officials on this type of issue. I think that would be rather challenging. We want to be very careful with the sharing of personal and private information, so we're very careful with that aspect of it as well. I think a lot of our clientele have founded or unfounded insecurities, perhaps, with the local officials.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It definitely has an impact, and we have no real way of knowing how much we're actually detecting. But sometimes we feel that there's something that doesn't make sense in the application, or we have concerns with a particular letter, or we get a “poison pen”, or we get other information.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I am very aware of this situation and I served for four years in Paris. I understand very well the work done by Quebec. The selection is done by Quebec, and that's why the processing time is shorter than it is for federal cases. However, health, safety and criminal considerations are a federal concern.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In 2010 we had various challenges, in terms of Olympics and so forth. I don't think there was as much time to go on these area checks. Selection of refugees is not done in the Moscow area. A lot of it is in Tajikistan or Uzbekistan. So going there and planning these trips is rather time-consuming.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's because for our refugees there's almost a 100% interview rate, so if we're not doing the interviews, then we're not processing. In the months that go by during which we don't do interviews, we're not really making selection decisions. We've done quite a few area trips in the last six or eight months, so that has helped us speed up the selection process.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We do expedited processing, of course, with certain cases—for instance, family reunification. That's one way we do triaging. But when it comes to processing skilled workers, it's based on first come, first served, and then as fast as we can get the documents that we need and make the decision.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Feel free to write to me and I'll look into it.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Whether they're in Armenia or Uzbekistan or any other country, we don't treat them any differently. There is a distance, there's no doubt about it, but with e-mail it really isn't much of a factor, although when we do need a document, it may take a little longer to get the document.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, it's true.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The communication between us is very, very good, but sometimes it's a little halting, and I'm sorry, but there was a key word that I missed. Can you please repeat?