Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Madam Fraser, you made some complimentary remarks about the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, but despite Jason Kenney's solid Jesuit training, he didn't get a gold star. So I would like to explore how we can get there.
Certainly this has to be one of the most bracing, exciting, and complex elements of Canadian nation-building: immigration, the processing of applicants from around the world. There's no limit on the number of people who can apply on any given day, whether as foreign skilled workers or temporary foreign workers or in any of the other categories. It's an exercise of gargantuan proportions. The numbers you reflected in your report are absolutely massive.
One of those numbers is a good number. Even though you said there are some 600,000 applications in the system, that represents a 30% decline from where we were as of a couple of years ago, as I understand it.