I'd like to pick up on the question of appointments to the IRB. We're very worried about the lack of reappointments of existing members. There have been some, but the general rule seems to be that there aren't reappointments.
That is a concern from a couple of points of view. One is that a system is political if people are barred from consideration because they were appointed by the previous government, and that is certainly the perception out there. The impact of that is that you are losing a lot of highly qualified board members, people who would be able to mentor and take the system forward.
If you lose a large number of qualified people and you replace them with new people, the new ones may be excellent but they will take at least six months to properly get up to speed, so there is a lot of wastage, and if they don't have the experienced members to mentor them, it may take them longer. So we're concerned at the Conservative government's apparent position that they are reluctant to reappoint existing qualified and competent members.
In terms of your general point about the refugee system, I think it is fair to say from our perspective that the Canadian refugee system, as Francisco mentioned, has a lot to be said for it, particularly if you look at other countries around the world. Many have extremely complicated systems where you go through various different steps. One of the great benefits of the Canadian system is that we have invested in a very competent first-level decision process. Rather than wasting time making a first decision that has to be overturned most of the time on the appeal, we have a first-level refugee determination that, generally speaking, is good. There will be mistakes, but they're no doubt the minority by far. However, sometimes errors are made, and that's why there needs to be an appeal process in the system.
We're not asking for there to be fundamental rethinking of the system--you mentioned the various parts. We sat down with the department, and we're happy to sit down with anybody to discuss how things might be adjusted here and there, and we have certainly many suggestions that we can make about how the whole thing could be made to work better. But the fundamentals of the system, in our view, are actually very sound.