Citizenship and Immigration committee  Could I just add something? I think it is important that the federal government have a role there. I think one of the issues that need to be addressed is getting pre-clearance on credentials before people come here so there isn't the problem that many people have of being admitted but once they get here not being able to pursue their own profession or trade.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the problem is that the types of industries you're talking about, where you bring in a large number of people and generally from similar places, are not the industries of the future. These are usually the industries of the past and are having trouble attracting labour.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  All work contributes to the GDP of our country. The question is, which type of work contributes the most?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Given that the current level seems to be too high, judging from the performance of the immigrants, raising it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. If you raise the limit, given the bureaucratic approach we have to immigration policy, what it means is that we will bring in more immigrants, either from out of the backlog or from a higher number of applications accepted.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You won't know whether it's a wise policy or not until 2015 or 2020, when you see how the immigrants have done.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Given that they've abandoned the long-form census, you're not even going to have the information now.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I do have a comment. If the problem is in five years, you're not talking about the demographic impact. What you're talking about now is that the labour force will stop growing in five years. That doesn't mean you need to take in more immigrants now; that just exacerbates the problem.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The problem in immigration is that the performance of immigrants has deteriorated over time, and this reflects the performance of both family class and economic immigrants, not to mention refugees. The government has been trying to deal with the whole issue of selecting the best economic immigrants by looking at the selection criteria.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  One more minute? Okay, I won't get into this.... Herb and I did an estimate of the cost of immigration. If you apply our number to this backlog you get a cost of $6 billion a year, if you allow all these people in. Also, you can calculate, based on the Statistics Canada data, that if you allow everybody in the backlog in and they do just as well as the previous one million people allowed in, 26.4% of them--or 265,000--will go into poverty.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's an honour to be here today and to be able to talk to you about immigration issues. The backlog is an important issue, but it's not the main important issue. It's really a symptom of an immigration policy in Canada that wasn't working and was generating large numbers of people who are not able to succeed in Canada's labour market.