Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank you all for coming here this afternoon. This program is very important, and I want to commend you for all of your excellent work.
I'm trying to put my finger on the fundamental problem here. Is there an administrative problem? Is it political will, regardless of parties and colour? I'm not talking about who is in government.
We're talking about 15,000 cases of backlog. I'm trying to figure out first if there is an administrative problem. We have a broader quota for how many immigrants come into this country. Within that quota we have a quota for refugees, and within that quota for refugees we have a quota for private sponsorship. It appears that the number of private sponsorship applications tend to be, understandably, greater than the assigned quota. Every year we have a backlog, so of course the backlog continues to grow.
Is the issue here one of the actual quota itself? Should it be greater? Or is the issue one of application processing that is not going at the right pace that it should be going at?