Thank you.
As Mr. St-Cyr said, this has been a topic that has been of interest for some time. Not Mr. Kenney, but one of the previous ministers I worked with in CIC, had the high commissioner in Ottawa to talk about refugees generally and the Canadian system in particular. He basically said, as I stated earlier, that the UNHCR has no complaint to make about the Canadian system. He said that from their perspective we have the best one in the world. One of us who was at the meeting--I can't remember who--asked him, “What do you think about an appeal division?” I'm probably breaking a confidence, for which I'll have to suffer the pain, but he said, “Somebody in my position can never say that an appeal division is a bad thing, but in our view we stick with what I said earlier: you have virtually a perfect system; people are not thrown out of Canada arbitrarily and we really have no complaints.” As a matter of fact, the UNHCR regularly peddles—if that's the right word—the Canadian system around the world. They do that systematically.
We in our ministry have gone around the world explaining our system, because it is the best one that we have. At one level there's no perfect system. I'll be the first one to admit that. Putting in the RAD is not going to make it perfect. We could put in two RADs and it still wouldn't be perfect.
Mr. St-Cyr argues that a greater jurisprudence developed by the RAD would help materially in the management of the system. Well, I'm not so sure. The Federal Court's jurisprudence on refugee issues is quite comprehensive. There are a lot of cases that bind the refugee protection division. I would also note that the refugee protection division does not deliver reasons in writing, except in negative cases. So we have a system already that I think is quite significantly tilted in favour of those who might not get refugee status. We don't think this is going to help.