Thank you, Mr. Chair. Minister, welcome.
I want to deal with some misconceptions. I've been listening to you and the parliamentary secretary long enough. There are sound bites, talking points, that are coming through. Yes, it has to be charter-compliant. Minister, as I told the parliamentary secretary, a security certificate was not compliant with the charter for 25 years and it was in place. So saying it's charter-compliant might be a wish, something that gets dealt with down the road.
There's another issue I'm bothered about. Right now we have an open, transparent system, the point system, the objectivity of which was established in 1967. It has been copied by Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. The United States Senate started a major study on it a year ago. The problem, from my perspective, hasn't been the openness or transparency of the system—those are good things. The problem has been the way we allocate points. It wasn't the politicians or the committee who made up the point system back in 2002; it was the bureaucrats.
When you compare our point system to Australia's and New Zealand's, it doesn't make any sense. We give 10 points for the maximum age, for someone who's 49 years old, whereas both New Zealand and Australia cut them off at a younger age. If we're going to get people over here, we need to get them over here early.
I think we could have had a fix on it if we had just done that. I said it was the bureaucrats who drove the point system in 2002. In Dragan v. Canada, the court issued an order of mandamus. The court makes it clear that a big problem has been that the bureaucrats misinformed this committee and the Governor in Council. But guess what? They got off scot-free—none of them ever had to deal with it.
I have in my hand a memorandum to the minister. It's been floating around for a long time. It makes it clear that the problem has always been that the bureaucracy has artificially been constraining resources. That's the only control they had over processing. So there's no issue. If we wanted to get people in quickly, we could. They don't have to wait six years. We can get a temporary foreign worker in for 35 days or a couple of months. They can get them in, no problem.
Minister, you're the first minister in this decade who has missed her numbers, meaning the forecast. In this last session, instead of coming in with a 240,000 to 265,000 range, you're going to be coming in with less than 237,000. Minister, under your watch, we have created a crisis on the Immigration and Refugee Board. We went from a backlog of 18,000 to something like 45,000, and we're going to be over 60,000 by year's end.
I have a real concern about who's in charge over there, and I have a real concern about the underhanded way this whole process is being snuck through Parliament, being put in legislation. You're accommodating the bureaucrats' dream—the bureaucrats who have spent so much time misinforming members of Parliament and the Governor in Council, and who are responsible for a big part of the mess we are in.