Mr. Speaker, as I was making my speech I stated that in the years under the Conservatives the application records have gone down, especially out of mainland China where we used to get tons of people applying to come to Canada. In my riding of Scarborough--Agincourt, a great number of people are applying from mainland China to come to Scarborough. Their applications dropped by about 50%. The real issue is, indeed, the backlog and we need to deal with that.
It is very simple. We should allocate resources where they are needed. We should expedite cases where we should. For example, a spousal case out of Colombo is taking two years, where in other places it takes six months. Although the issue is the backlog, it is also a matter of taking resources from different posts and putting them to posts where we need them to deal with the processing of applications.
Maybe the minister will do something about reallocating the resources instead of having SWAT teams. She has SWAT teams of retired immigration officers who are going from country to country to deal with the backlog. These people are not getting paid normal wages. These people get paid exorbitant wages and are put in fancy hotels, which costs the department an arm and a leg.