Thank you for that.
Yes, there are two things that I raised in my opening statement. One was the issue of immigration fraud and how we can combat it, the whole issue of third parties. I know this committee has looked at that in the past, but what can we do more systematically to protect applicants for immigrant status or visas to Canada, or prospective applicants, from unscrupulous operators, who often get people into trouble and who clog up our system? This is a very important issue, and I think you could actually make very useful recommendations to the government on this on a non-partisan basis.
Secondly, we're spending a lot of money on this whole issue of integration and settlement services now. We've basically tripled the federal investment in settlement services, and not infrequently when I'm out there talking to people in the immigrant communities, they raise concerns with me about the effectiveness of the investments we're making.
When I was in India, I sat in on an interview of a Canadian citizen who was sponsoring a spousal application. This was a Canadian citizen who had lived in Canada for, I think, 14 years, but who could not conduct an interview in English with the immigration officer. It was a woman in her thirties who's lived in Canada for nearly 15 years and who was not competent in English, which says to me—and I hear many, many anecdotes like this—that we're failing, and that we're failing that woman. If she didn't know that the LINC program was available before she became a citizen, if we're not.... We don't want to end up in a situation in this country where people are excluded from opportunities in our society because they don't have language capability.
This raises another question as well—which I raised the last time I was here, and which could be another subject of study for the committee—about the citizenship process. How could someone like that become a citizen, which requires basic competency in one of our two languages, without actually being able to demonstrate it?
So I think these are all important questions. I'd like to see best practices. There are some immigrant settlement organizations that I think have a very strong track record, perhaps more so than others. There are different jurisdictions abroad that have very successful programs, as I understand Germany does. So I think we could review both international and domestic best practices in that respect.