Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have one comment. I always feel it's common sense for anyone to learn from their own journey. It's smart to learn from others' experiences. I did negotiate drafts with state members in Geneva on the global compact. We did suggest.... One of the ironic things in the global com

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The short answer is yes. Definitely, Canada can and should do more. There is a general sense right now in Canadian society that privately sponsored refugees are better educated than government-sponsored refugees, and that implies that government-sponsored refugees can't contribut

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For every single number I mentioned, I'm more than happy. I even have them here with me on paper—the links and the references to the studies. I'm more than happy to send them to the committee.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I will take a first try at this. I can't really comment on whether there is enough or not. Should we get more? I'm going to be a bit biased and think about it. I think we can do 350,000, and we can do even more. The country needs more. We're talking about only less than 1% of th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Let me also make a point here that the extra spending on newcomers, refugees or immigrants basically is going back into the economy. It's not that they take the money and send it somewhere else. It increases the country's aggregate demands on physical expansion. More gets more se

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not really in a place to know what the cap is that we can do, but that little increase.... It used to be less than 300,000. Now we're talking about a little bit more, about around 50,000 more a year. I'm pretty sure that any country, including Canada, one of the best countrie

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The program called Welcome Talent Canada is in partnership with LinkedIn as of three weeks ago. This is going to be a national program. It's one of our Jumpstart programs. Jumpstart has five programs, and it is one of them. Mentorship in partnership with LinkedIn is going to be i

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We piloted a program last year with 50 Syrian refugees. It was only for Syrian refugees. Right now the program is available for all refugees, including refugee claimants. Out of the 50, in six months 23 of them had found jobs. When we say “jobs”, with our work, I'm talking about

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and esteemed members. Until a couple of years ago, I never wanted to tell the people I met that I was a refugee claimant. I tried to justify hiding the truth about my status. I told myself that, if people knew, they might respond to me with fear, hatred or,