Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. When you were talking about putting more money into the system, I think that's a good idea. Putting more resources into the system, I think, is a good idea. Streamlining, I think, is a good idea. Of course, we're community advocates, so we don't work

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I understand that. I think when we talk about this issue, we're very cautious to just emphasize, and I know we've made this point, that while there may be a short-term cost to processing family class applications, it will be a long-term investment. There is a return on investment

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the question. I think I'll just reiterate some of what we were recommending. Obviously, we feel very strongly that the parent and grandparent program, which is the area that we just happen to know particularly well because of our research, is very important. We fe

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'll just highlight our recommendations. We want to remove the quota. We want to lower the minimum necessary income. We want to reduce the sponsorship undertaking period to 10 years. We want the super visa to be treated not as a family reunification program but as a visa, which i

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Do you mean to clarify the quota system, the cap?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Do you mean us?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Just related to the cap, we see that certainly the system before the quota was put in place was inadequate, and many organizations across the country were referring to the long wait times. I know that the wait times and the processing times for parents and grandparents were state

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for that question. I also take a researcher's perspective. I think we need a bit more information to understand specifically. Working at the community level we can only see what we see, and that's a high need for people to be reunited with their families, but if we wer

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In the time that remains, I will be presenting key findings from our research in 2013. First, we found that there are profound economic impacts to family separation. From our research participants, we heard that sponsored parents and grandparents were playing critical roles as c

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thanks. Among critics of the program, it has been suggested that the process of immigration involves leaving one's loved ones back home. This is problematic. We found that many of our participants chose Canada instead of other countries because of its promise of family reunific