Finance committee  Good afternoon. I'm David Chan, acting director of asylum policy at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. What these amendments bring is not really related to the safe third country agreement. The amendments we're putting forward are in relation to the practice of online claims that were introduced during the pandemic.

Finance committee  You're correct that the amendments will more formally introduce an in-person requirement. As you can imagine, prior to the pandemic the process by which a claimant would make a claim was always done in person. It was never necessary to put that in law. Now that we're embracing the online mechanism, we need to be more clear in law to say that a claim is not considered made from the perspective of the law until the claimant meets with an officer to verify some of the integrity requirements from the IRCC's perspective.