We have to go back in history a little bit.
One hang-up I see is the ministers in the immigration department. We have seen more than a dozen ministers since 1993, starting with Mr. Gerry Weiner to the present minister. I have probably met each one of them.
The problem arises with the bureaucrats. They go for what is politically correct or PC. We don't have the power, so let's go and change the regulations and get the power. In the last regulations, they wanted to change or introduce the language exam. They held onto applications, sat on them for a number of years, and we had two years of wrangling in Parliament, and two class actions. The first one was initiated by my law firm, the Dragan case, just to introduce the English-language exam. So what I see is that the bureaucrats--not the members of Parliament--lack the field knowledge of what's to be done.
The simple solution at the time would have been to tell the applicants, “Look, we do not have the powers to ask you to take an exam”--which was the case under the old system--“but we want you to take this exam, whereby we can expedite your process or we can waive your interview.” If that simple thing was told to the people, we could have solved this problem in 1999 or 2000. Rather, they sat on the applications for 18 months, and then we got into the retroactivity, which was challenged in the first case by our law firm, the Dragan case. It was subsequently followed by a class action across the country and resulted in $3 million being paid to the lawyers for the class action.