Thank you very much, all of you.
Mr. Wiebe, when you mentioned the boat people, I thought of Dr. Frank Epp, who was a journalist and author, and I believe he was secretary of the Mennonite Central Committee Canada at the time, if my recollection is correct, and he made the motion to start sponsoring refugees. All of you do wonderful work.
I was thinking about what you said, that we're good at resettling whole groups but not quite as good at resettling small numbers from here and there. I all of a sudden thought of what happened with the Hungarian refugees. It's the 50th anniversary of my coming to this country. It was an excellent project, and Canada did well by it.
I think of Rahim, from the Ugandan refugees. That was one of those mass movements, if you will, that was very well-handled with minimal damage.
I think of what happened to the boat people. They had a much tougher time, and it took a much longer time. I know that during the Kosovo wars, we just bent over backwards, we went over, we were very proactive. We could hardly work fast enough to get them over to this country. There was really a political will.
Committee members should think about—I spent three months in a refugee camp, actually three refugee camps, and they were a lot better than the conditions I have seen in a lot of the refugee camps now, some horrific conditions. What we have to get our heads around is the longer people spend in refugee camps, the more psychological damage they will suffer. Many of the camps are very unsafe. Security, nutrition, boredom, crime—it's a very unnatural setting.
If we're going to take refugees, which we should, then we should think about, even from our selfish perspective, that we want to get them here as quickly as possible. If it's a question of family reunification, if we get somebody over here to Canada and they're employed and everything else but they have a very close relative overseas, it's really debilitating to them. I'm sure many of us have had people come into our office virtually crying, trying to get their mother or their daughter into this country. I always found it incredibly heartbreaking listening to these stories and, quite frankly, feeling their pain.
You mentioned Yes Minister. I have been on this committee for eight years and we have had seven ministers. This year we've had two ministers in less than a year. In Yes Minister, the characters change, but the storyline is much the same.
I think we have to embrace particularly what you are offering, because it hardly costs the government any money and it involves a huge voluntary sector in the settlement. If you want to spread out people across the country, it's a great way of doing it. Do it with families.
I wonder if you could comment on maybe the last number of years, things being...because I hear the same story every time we get into this situation, and I keep hearing it over again. I wonder if it would be helpful if you as an association could, and not individually but as an association, make rankings of the various visa posts. I know it's difficult coming in here and saying this one is good, that one is bad--a course evaluation, if you will. For those posts that have good experiences, and you mentioned Kenya as being one of them—maybe practices there should be passed on to some of the other posts.
I wonder if you have a comment on that, if you could possibly do that, and communicate with the committee, because I think the committee will have to set some—