Thank you very much.
One of the issues I want to touch on is that the whole issue of temporary foreign workers is about importing disposable labour. It's not all that different from what was done with the Chinese when we brought them in to build the railway. Now this is the new kind of way we're going at it; we don't call it slavery, but it comes close to it. We have indentured workers and we really have no respect for the folks with lower skills.
I just want to point to Frank Stronach, Magna International; Frank Hasenfratz, chair of Linamar Corporation; Mike Lazaridis, who makes the BlackBerry. None of them would get in under today's system. This just points to the silliness of the whole system.
In my mind, if you wanted to deal with some temporary foreign workers who have a lot of power because their skills are really in demand.... They don't have a problem; the people who have the problem are the people at the bottom end.
In terms of regularization, the previous government was working on it and was very close to coming forward with legislation. The government fell and the bureaucrats went back to their stance under the previous government and gained control of the issue. The point I'm making here is that a lot of this stuff is driven by the bureaucracy. To the extent we've had seven ministers of immigration in the last 10 years, it points to it. In a lot of cases, we've been fighting the bureaucracy in trying to get something done.
I hope that when Bill C-50 comes along, you will all come out. It's going be here soon, as it's surely the big elephant we're going to be dealing with next.
In terms of the refugee system, the problem is that we have now created a crisis. The backlog was down to 20,000, and we finally had the system fixed, and then Jean-Guy Fleury ended up quitting because of political interference. And now the backlog is up to over 42,000; it's going to hit 60,000 by the end of the year; and we have a shortage of something like 58 adjudicators. So the crisis was created when we already had the system fixed. By politicizing it, it really created a crisis.
I think the public has to be made aware of what is going on in immigration, because I don't think they are, and we must not let it be exploited for political purposes, such as getting votes.
I'd like your quick comment.