Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for appearing before us today and for your testimonies.
First of all, I want to correct the record because I heard the words “cash grab” in the testimony, because the fees are going to be increased to $300. For your information, Mr. Farber, it costs us $550 to process a citizenship application. This will just be bringing it closer to what someone should be paying. When you compare it to our peer countries, in the United States, it's the equivalent of $669.48 Canadian. In the United Kingdom, it's $1,615.94 Canadian. In New Zealand, it's $433.64 Canadian, just to put things in perspective. It's asking citizenship applicants to bear more of the costs of what it actually costs for that application to come to the country.
Mr. Attia, recently there was an article in a Korean outlet about the importance of implementing Bill C-24 as soon as possible. The article explained that the sooner the bill gets passed, the sooner wait times will be reduced to under a year. We know that we here in Canada welcome a record number of immigrants and new citizens. We average better than a quarter of a million new immigrants per year and since 2006 we have welcomed over 1.4 million new Canadians. These are record numbers.
As a Conservative government we have the highest sustained level of immigration in Canadian history. Under the new decision-making model, citizenship cases will go from a three-step process to a one-step process.
Streamlining this application process to less than a year, how do you think this will affect immigrants and newcomers hoping to become Canadian citizens?