Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to all of you for appearing before us today and for sharing your views and for, quite frankly, the very passionate way in which you explained some cases you're familiar with.
I want to go through a couple of points first. I really think we're all trying to accomplish the same thing here. Our goal is to try to get legitimate refugees, people who need our assistance, into the country as fast as possible. We need a mechanism in order to accomplish that in the fastest possible way. Clearly the system today is broken. It is not working.
I think Canadians take pride in the generosity and compassion of our immigration and refugee programs. They have no tolerance for those who abuse our generosity and seek to take unfair advantage of our country. Canada remains one of the top countries in the world to welcome refugees. In fact, we welcome more refugees per capita than any other G-20 country. Canada welcomes one in 10 of the world's resettled refugees. That is more per capita than almost any other country. In fact our Conservative government has increased the number of refugees resettling each year by 2,500 people.
Bill C-31 proposes changes that build on reforms to the asylum system passed in June 2010 as part of the Balanced Refugee Reform Act, as you well know. The proposed measures would provide faster protection to those who genuinely need refuge and faster removal of those who don't. Currently the time to finalize a refugee decision, if you will, takes 1,038 days, on average. With these new measures in Bill C-31, that could be as low as 45 days for people coming from designated countries and certainly 216 days for all other claimants, surely the very people who need that assistance.
Let's talk about family reunification. People are coming here from countries where they were facing persecution, torture, death in many cases. Surely the amount of time they have to be in a holding pattern when they come to our shores so they can be properly identified and processed.... That's the key. We want to identify people before we allow them into Canadian society for obvious reasons.
Forty-one people who came on the Sun Sea and Ocean Lady were found to be security risks or had perpetrated war crimes in their country. We can't allow just everybody. I know we want to be compassionate, but we have a responsibility to the Canadian people and I'm sure you understand that. You wouldn't want them in your neighbourhood. You wouldn't want them going to school with your children. You wouldn't want them around your families. Nobody would.
Would you agree that this is a problem that needs to be fixed? That's my question to you. Please, any and all....