Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to speak.
Thank you to the witnesses for coming here today to discuss this issue.
The relevance of today's meeting is quite important. We're dealing with the competency of refugee board judges.
As we talked about earlier, you're the last line before someone is allowed into or expelled from the country, and the power the two of you have is enormous in people's lives. We can't forget that.
The process here is to deal with a number of issues. Two of the important issues are, one, to highlight the drastic shortage we have in citizenship and refugee board judges, a shortage that is causing a major backlog in refugees and new Canadians coming to Canada.
I'm trying to understand through the process of this committee whether the shortage is a direct result of the refusal of the current government to take action to hire or reappoint people such as you, or if this lack of action—