Citizenship and Immigration committee  Nothing identical to that, no.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Per my testimony it was not the practice for all refugees. This tracking was put in place for the resettlement of Syrian refugees only for a period beginning in January, February 2015, and that was the policy of the government at that time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The government of the day had put in place a number of areas of focus to prioritize the processing of refugees from Syria, and asked the department to record at interview the matching, if you will, of the cases in question against these areas of focus.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, that's right.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and welcome to all the committee members. I would like first of all to make a clarification to a response made by Mr. Bob Orr at a previous session. A member asked if the department had ever been directed to track if refugees were members of religious, ethnic, or sexual minority groups.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd defer to my operational colleagues. Generally speaking, we do processing more and more at different stages and at different centralized offices around the world and in Canada. The mission-by-mission permanent resident targets are becoming somewhat less meaningful, but we could examine what information we could make available.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The Yazidi population is primarily in northern Iraq. Also, some are in parts of Syria, along the no longer barely existing Iraq-Syria border. We understand there are some Yazidi refugees in camps in Turkey as well.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, I would not agree with that characterization. There are large numbers of extremely desperate populations all over the Middle East. At this time we are processing some Yazidi cases. Most of the Yazidi population, tragically, are not accessible to our officials or officials of any resettlement country.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  And I, in turn, will turn it over to Dawn Edlund. Operationally, I know we have a trip planned to Erbil in northern Iraq, and we continue to work with the UNHCR to identify the most vulnerable groups. Most of the Yazidi population, which has been very tragically persecuted, are in camps in northern Iraq that are difficult to access, and some are in camps in Turkey.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, the Government of Canada met its commitment to resettle over 22,000, I believe. Ms. Edlund?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It was 23,000 Iraqi refugees. It was the largest resettlement program of any single nationality that Canada had done in a long time. We continue to process some Iraqi refugees, but at smaller volumes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The inventory numbers we are talking about are the applications of the caregiver and their family members. They are a combined application for permanent residence. In this program, about 50% of the applicants are caregivers and 50% are family members. Processing times right now are backward looking about 48 months, but we expect those to drop rapidly over the next year or two.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would just clarify that the number of expected admissions in the caregiver program this year is 22,000, not 16,000. Therefore, we expect that at the end of year, the inventory will be not much more than one year's worth of levels. With regard to the two new classes, there's a maximum space available in each class of 2,750 principal applicant spaces.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, we have certain standards, statistical data fields in our systems. We record people's nationality, age, gender, and so forth. We do not count people's sexual orientation. We do not have statistics on that. Simply, we would have to ask it of every individual to have reliable statistics on that.