Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of the processing of the cases, I'm going to divide them into a couple of different groups. If I look at those who had a connection to Canada, those who served Canada in one form or another, we've processed about 14,000 applications. On top of that, we had the commitment

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We look at this in three groups. One of those three groups includes interpreters who came to Canada in 2009 and 2012 and their extended families. We have the first slightly more than 1,000 applications in for those now. Those are being processed. The second group is those who are

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We're happy to do it. I think Mr. Mills may have an answer for you though.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Let me clarify that the number may be the same, but once you call the number, you get options. One of the options is Ukraine. One of the options is Afghanistan. There are specific resources devoted to that Ukrainian hotline. There are specific resources devoted to Afghanistan. W

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Imposing or lifting a visa on a country is a complicated business. It involves a number of steps. It involves a memorandum to cabinet. It involves regulatory change. It involves changes to our system. It involves changes to the systems of our partners there. Those steps take some

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Madam Chair, I'm really glad the honourable member has raised this, because, first, I think that's a bit of disinformation. We'll go back to the call line and we'll make sure that's corrected. The commitment that the government made is that we are putting a priority on all our a

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. People who have current applications in will not have to reapply. What I think the minister made an announcement on this morning will be a special dedicated or expanded family sponsorship pathway. We're just sorting out the program details for that now. People who have appli

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is visa-free travel for which countries? Sorry, Madam Chair.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Madam Chair, I will come back to the fact that there are lots of reasons we have a visa on specific countries, so we will come back to looking at security issues in a country and looking at their rate of immigration violations. We have a framework that looks at visas there. It's

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Of course, Madam Chair.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  One of the beauties of having electronic applications is that we can move those applications throughout our system, so if we have some spare capacity in Beijing or some spare capacity in Ottawa, Mississauga, Sydney or wherever in our network, we're able to absolutely be the most

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Madam Chair, I want to assure the honourable member that we are using our facilities in Islamabad. We have an office in Islamabad. We have 13 Canada-based officers there, I believe. We are processing there, but we are also processing those applications elsewhere. We are using it

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, we do interviews in Islamabad. We have done some interviews virtually during the pandemic. That has worked out very well. I think it provides much better client service, but we would do interviews in Islamabad, absolutely.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Madam Chair, we have our existing programs and we work through those. However, in terms of special programming for Afghanistan and what we've done, we have a big commitment around those who served Canada either with the military or with Global Affairs who were there. We have a se

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We used a lot of innovative practices. It came down to focusing on what was achievable and what was possible. That was looking at landings for many who were already in Canada—