Citizenship and Immigration committee  Individuals will fill in an online form and that information will be assessed by the automated system to determine if they meet the minimum entry criteria and can be admitted to the pool. That's all automated so there is no officer check at that stage. Only after an individual ha

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll turn to James if he needs to fill in more. Essentially, there's a mandamus risk in that once we receive an application, we are obliged to process it to conclusion. We also are required to do so within a reasonable time, and the bigger the backlogs are and the longer the time

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We're still working on the question of costs. That is subject to ongoing review and discussion, and subject to approval, so I can't provide details of costs at this time. On the question of processing times, clearly, one of the goals is to ensure fast processing for those candid

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What we're talking about here are the foundational legislative amendments that are necessary to go forward with an EOI system. There are other aspects to getting EOI up and running. We are developing costs. We're in discussions. We are reviewing them. They are still subject to de

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, I don't think there's a direct relationship between EOI and the numbers of individuals arriving in Canada under the provincial nominee program or any other economic stream. The annual levels plan is the vehicle through which those numbers are established every year. EOI

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, we're working very closely with ESDC to ensure that anything we do on the EOI side of things is consistent with the greater Government of Canada objective of ensuring that Canadian workers are not displaced—we're very mindful of that—but also recognizing that we do receive

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, I don't think that's the case. I guess there are a number of elements to the response. We're in discussions with provinces and territories about their use of EOI. One possibility is they may wish to choose to run part or all of their provincial nominee programs through the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The same processes will apply as currently apply. Principal applicants and their accompanying family members will be processed as one, sort of at once. This wouldn't change that at all. It doesn't affect that approach.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The ones that are more frequently going to change, like the frequency of the draws or the number of individuals who would be invited to apply, will be just on CIC's website. I think it's important, though, to come at this in a different way as well and to recognize that whatever

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't believe it's our intention to, subject to further discussion. The MIs will be publicly available for comment.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thanks for the question. Again, coming back to a fundamental goal, it's to increase the chances of success for new immigrants. We know that having a job offer in hand when immigrants arrive is an important indicator, a factor in their being able to establish economically quickly

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Pardon me?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  To be clear, there's a lot of program and policy work that is still under way, and we are working very closely with colleagues at ESDC to keep in lockstep with the developments on their side related to things like the job bank, LMO requirements, and so on. The idea is that we wo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As noted, the EOI is not a new program. It would become a mandatory pre-application step to apply to certain economic programs; the current thinking, but to be confirmed, is for the federal skilled worker program, the Canadian experience class, and the federal skilled trades prog

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, those are some of the details that we're working out with ESDC. I think, depending on the.... There are a lot of discussions under way obviously about the temporary foreign worker program and the—