Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I indicated before, in discussing the question of the family class generally, I think that if you want to assess the economic impact of the presence of the people in Canada, then you can't look only at their earnings. You have to look at the earnings of the family unit, at a m

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The immigrants of the same age?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  All other immigrants?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, you might say the appropriate comparison would be people in the same demographic category. I think that's not a proper economic model. The census of Canada is very clear to identify families as economic units. They call it “economic family”. The census data are collected in

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll pass. I don't have a view on that question. Thank you.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is a very interesting question, and we don't have a lot of evidence I can cite in research showing that people are attracted to one country as opposed to another because of more liberal family-class admission criteria, but the point was made earlier that, when family members

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's my view that the legislation requires Parliament to set the total numbers of immigrants, and within that numbers are allocated across the various categories, and they all can be seen as, in effect, quotas. It seems to me setting the numbers is part of the responsibility of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think to have people under a family class without any kind of limit at all, that would be contrary to the legislation.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. I certainly agree with all the comments that have been made by the other two presenters, but I want to emphasize that while we may call the family class a humanitarian class, that is a term we're using, it seems to imply less of an economic contribution from the family class

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I guess one of the points I would make there is that as we've seen the immigration numbers change over the years, there has been a definite attempt to increase the proportion of immigrants selected on the basis of economic criteria and reduce the family-class component. I think t

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure, this is my last sentence: the family class is an important part of the economic goal of the immigration program. Thank you.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the invitation to appear here, and for the opportunity to present some views. My comments are not about any of the specific questions about the features of family-class immigration, but about the place of family-class immigration in the overall immigration program.