Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Finley, gentlemen and ladies.
I am a new member of the Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. It is a committee that has great significance for us as MPs.
You said that you were working very hard to help temporary workers become involved and adapt to the country as much as possible. You also have programs that assess the credentials of other categories of workers. But you have not talked about the problems of family reunification and refugees.
Our constituency offices often have to deal with problems like that. They see heart-wrenching cases: people who have been accepted as refugees, but whose children, for some peculiar reason, are still in their home country. We have all the difficulty in the world getting cooperation from your department on problems like that.
Let me tell you about one particular case. An Algerian lady was accepted as a resident in Canada, but her children were still in Algeria. So she wants to get them here. The embassy that deals with their file is in Paris. You can see the problem. The children's passports have to get to the embassy in Paris.
How can the children physically and financially handle all these immigration requirements? The requirements are important, but there are no resources to help people meet them. I was even ready, as an MP, to pay FedEx to take the passports to the embassy to get the process underway. Your department absolutely refused, saying that FedEx had no business shipping passports. Short of going to do the department's job ourselves, since it is not there on-site for cases like that, there are no resources.
I would like to hear what you have to say about that. Is it your intention to improve the services that we have to provide to people whom we have accepted as refugees here and are good citizens. It is important for them to be reunited with their families. If our own children were left in another country, on another continent, how would we handle it?