Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, you know what--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm here to ensure that the same thing doesn't happen year after year, as this government has been doing. It is allowing backlogs and not allowing the claims of immigrants to enter in a timely manner. That's what we're here for. It is to fight for the new immigrants who are comin

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's not in front of me, but I can certainly tell you that we know, just within our membership lists--it's been around since 1996--that staffing levels have gone down. If we have to go back and get it for every year, we can go back to our membership lists and do that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There's full-time involved, where they're not replaced when they retire.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are both.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Correct. How can you not?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  They're hired to do a workload and process citizenship and permanent residency cards. Citizenship cards and permanent residency cards still exist and they still come in, whether they're done by a full-time person or a term person.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll respond to that. And please don't misquote me again, because I never said our term employees were not qualified employees. What I said is that when our terms are let go and you have to rehire off the street, you're back into a training mode. I respect our term employees, our

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, they do.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In some cases I think there is some of that assumption, that they will be kept because of the workload that's there and the number of applications that come in on a daily basis. So there is an assumption that even though they might have signed a letter that--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You just have to look at the workload. Let's go back to the workload, because this is what we're here for. The work is coming in--3,500 applications a day--and there are so many bodies--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll go back to the point we're trying to make here, which is the workload. The workload is there, it keeps coming in, and we want enough staff to meet the needs of that workload. I'll make it very clear. We are not against hiring term people. It doesn't matter if they're on c

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think in the last five or six years it has spiralled up and down. There's a lot of use of terms and maybe casuals, so that does create a problem, because it's not just the issue of being understaffed. The workload continues to come in. The workload doesn't stop, so there's alwa

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If you look at the last 10 years, the staffing overall in the immigration department has gone down quite a lot. Even in the early nineties, when there were some cuts--federal departments all had to face cuts and there was a cut in the overall public service--Immigration was one o

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We go by the list of the membership we have. We can count them, and 83 terms were being let go. Then there are casual workers. Casual workers within the federal government are supposed to be there for only a certain number of days--I think now it's gone up to 90 days--so once the