Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today. It was interesting to hear your comments.
We've been meeting, as you may well know, with several groups over the last little while, listening to the concerns people have either in favour or in support of certain clauses in Bill C-31. The process for us here is that in due course we'll be reviewing the bill line by line and taking into consideration this democratic input that we have from our witnesses, so your testimony is very important to us. So thank you again for being here.
I want to address the issue of a legitimate refugee who actually really needs the help, because I think that is a common element for all of us. We all want that. We all want to be able to service as quickly as possible the person who is coming here, who was persecuted, whose life was in danger, possibly facing torture or death in their own country. We're finding that a lot of these folks who need help are tied up in a system behind a group that is quite often not a legitimate refugee group, tying up the system.
To process a claim today can go as long as 1,038 days. With the measures in this proposed bill, we can reduce that to 45 days for claimants from designated countries, and 216 days for all other claimants.
One phenomena we're seeing is that we're getting, from one part of the world in particular, 95% of the claimants either abandoning or withdrawing...or their claim is flat-out rejected.
Now, that 95%, apart from the fact that it's costing about $170 million a year—let's just not put a value, because we're talking about human life here—is really tying up the people who legitimately can come into the country.
Can I get your comments on why people would voluntarily abandon or withdraw their claim and return to a country in which they originally claimed they were being persecuted?