Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for drawing our attention to the Statistics Canada study. We'd like to make sure we are monitoring that gap. The settlement program at the department is targeted to immigrants and refugees in order to help them find and retain employment. That's the key, and you mentioned it.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You're absolutely correct.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure, I'm happy to. A lot of those programs that you mentioned are permanent immigration programs. The Atlantic immigration program has been in existence for three years now. The objective is really to try—through some new approaches to working with employers, with personalized settlement plans—to ensure that a permanent resident will be interested and motivated with the supports that he or she needs to remain in the Atlantic.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can start. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for inviting us to speak to your study on the migration challenges and opportunities in the 21st century. I am the acting director general of the immigration branch at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, or IRCC for short. With me is Helene Panagakos, director of temporary resident programs operations, and Paulette Lefebvre, director of biometrics program operations.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can. I think some of the things that were introduced or modified in 2013 were really to make that period of responsibility longer. There was the move to the 20-year sponsorship undertaking period. We adjusted the income threshold to sponsor to what's called “minimum necessary income, plus 30%”, just to make sure there isn't that sense of a draw on the family income, as well as requiring sponsors to provide three-year evidence of income stability in order to ensure there is the financial stability in the family unit that is sponsoring.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We do it in two ways. One way is that we're actually able to link our administrative immigration data with tax filing information, so it gives us a nice longitudinal picture of outcomes, mainly economic but also incidence of employment among all of these different categories, which allows us to compare, then, family class immigrants versus other classes of immigrants.