Mr. Speaker, most of the member's speech emphasized how happy he is that the minister is going to have the power to get rid of a person's citizenship.
One of the concerns that I have, and I have had the opportunity to express this on several occasions, is the significant increase in processing times for citizenship, to the degree that it is almost three years long. It is about 28 months, or two and a half years. That is up, well over 100%, in terms of time for processing citizenship applications since the government took office.
For the people who happen to be part of that percentage of, some would estimate, about 20% of applicants, it will take up to four or five years in order to be processed.
The government is bringing forward this legislation in the hope that it will reduce the time. No doubt the government will want to claim that it reduced the times of processing for citizenship, and will try to take credit for a reduction of times for processing in this crisis that it created.
Why is having decent processing times for people applying for citizenship been such a low priority?