Nor will Martin's plan give Ottawa a better handle on how to deport the 20,000 bogus refugee claimants rejected since 1995. Or to even know for sure how many are still here and where.

Nor will it ease the pain of all law-abiding Canadians and corporations forced to put up with inordinate immigration delays.

Hospitals and other employers needing to import radiation therapists and other skilled workers must wait an average of 21 months to get them.

Canadian citizens sponsoring spouses or parents from the Philippines, China, India and Pakistan must endure a delay of nearly two years to be united with their immediate family members.

Honest, hard-working, tax-paying landed immigrants who have been beavering away in Canada at least for three years must wait a full year to obtain their citizenship certificates which they need for a passport and to exercise such basic rights as their franchise.

All these people can expect no major immediate relief from Martin's measures, concedes Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan.

That's because her ministry will get only $371 million of Martin's largesse. And most of that is designated for settling the 5,000 invited Kosovars and the 599 uninvited boat people for whom Ottawa is responsible, not the provinces, for their first two years in Canada.

Caplan will be left with barely $50 million to oil the creaky machinery under her command.

She plans some pilot projects to speed up the cases of family members and temporary workers already here, without forcing them through the so-called Buffalo shuffle. That's the bureaucratic manoeuvre for living up to the letter but not the spirit of the law that immigrants apply from outside the country even if they are already in it, quite legally.

Caplan may also parachute special teams into busy missions abroad to relieve backlogs.

She should also instruct them to impart some manners and professionalism to the officials there who, like cops patrolling a bad area, seem to have descended into the prejudiced presumption that everyone, especially in Asia and Africa, is guilty unless proven innocent.

Caplan deserves credit for being the first minister in years to get additional funds for the cash-strapped ministry. Also for convincing the cabinet to curtail the unconscionable practice of slapping a hefty $975 a head ``head tax'' on refugees (even while continuing to collect from them the non-refundable processing fee of $500 per adult and $100 per child). It is, as she says, ``an important first step.''

However, these limited reforms take a back seat to security-related expenditures: $87 million for Customs, almost all of it to beef up border security; and $810 million for the Solicitor-General, most of it for the Mounties and some for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, largely for anti-terrorism work.

Martin telegraphed his justification this way in his budget speech: ``The RCMP faces new challenges in the area of organized crime and international terrorism.''

The background papers were only slightly more forthcoming:

``In the past year, Canada has experienced an unprecedented increase in the number of migrants attempting to bypass proper channels for entering the country.''

It has? Beyond the 599 Chinese boat people who - however much fodder they may have provided radio hotline hosts coast to coast, and their equally excitable callers - were a drop in the bucket of 20,000 or so claimants who turn up every year at our airports or at the American border? Does Ottawa know something the rest of us don't?

Furthermore, the budget papers declared: ``Allowing this illegal migration to continue would clearly compromise the integrity of the refugee determination and immigration systems.''

How so, any more than the other demonstrably bogus claimants among the other 19,400?

Perhaps the expenditure is designed more to restoring public confidence in the system than actually fixing it. Arguably, it is a justifiable periodic exercise in democratic consensus building. So long as we remain under no illusions as to its purpose.