I actually think this is an important issue. It came up at almost every opposition speech at second reading, and understandably so.
There is this ridiculous accusation from some people that the government.... I've read these ridiculous articles that say the government planned a crisis in the system by building up this big backlog. Look, the reforms are necessary in large part because large backlogs have been a permanent feature of this asylum system for well over a decade. The average size of the backlog of pending asylum claims before the IRB was 40,000 in the past decade alone. At one point, under the previous Liberal government, it was up to 52,000.
The previous government made some sensible efforts to try to reduce this by injecting short-term resources into the IRB and the CBSA. They didn't work. They worked in the short term to reduce the backlog, for example, down to 20,000. But then it just starts going back up again.
This is the story of our current, frankly broken, refugee system. It is so slow moving and so cumbersome that it creates a vicious cycle. The slower moving it is, the greater the incentive for false claimants to enter the system seeking to immigrate to Canada through the back door of the asylum system. And then the backlogs get bigger.
Now some have said that all we need to do is maintain the current system but spend more and speed things up. Bill Clinton once said that one definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. I think it would be a disservice to Canadian taxpayers, to refugees, and to the public confidence in our asylum system if we were simply to dump more money--and this is what we've done in the past--without fixing the architecture of the system in a balanced way, which is what we seek to do.
When our government came to office, we inherited a 20,000-person backlog. Then, between 2006 and 2008 we saw a 60% increase in the number of claims. Altogether, since we took office, there have been about 20,000 more claims made than what is the capacity of the fully funded, fully staffed IRB to finalize decisions, which over four years would be 100,000 finalizations, or 25,000 per year.
It is true that part of the current backlog--and I admit this--is attributable to a short-term period of vacancies on the IRB as the government was moving to adopt a new and more rigorous pre-screening process. I'm pleased to say that it's working. Since I became minister, I have done 99 appointments or re-appointments. The RPD and the IRB are at 99% occupancy. And we're now beginning to turn the corner on the backlog, thanks in part to the visa impositions last year. That was a difficult decision, but we now finally have a surplus, if you will, of finalizations over claims made. We're starting to turn the corner, but we won't really be able to turn the corner in a significant way without such reforms.