Mr. Chair, I'm particularly interested in the family reunification wait times. I have heard it's three years, five years, eight years to bring a mother or a father into the country, so I'm very interested in this study. The minister tells me that the family reunification wait times have been dropping for the first time ever. That's what I heard in the House of Commons when I asked last Thursday, I believe. So I do want to know, whether from Beijing in China or from India, whether it is a fact that wait times have been dropping.
We do need to deal with the temporary foreign workers report. That report, hopefully, will be done maybe in March or April, and we would be looking at something beyond, starting in the spring. This is an issue that I think will have a lot of impact on our constituents. Most often when people come to our office, they say, “Help. My parents were very healthy, but now they are getting a bit sick; they're getting a bit old. They've been waiting for years.”
I understand the backlog didn't start from the Conservative side; it started during the years when the Liberals were in power. At this point, whether it's Liberal or Conservative doesn't matter anymore. The backlog is a big problem, especially wait times for parents. I do hope that, whether this motion is referred or not referred, the subcommittee will see this as a priority, because it is really hard for new immigrants to wait all these years for their parents to come to Canada.