For the most part, I would say that in these types of cases, part of the situation is that we don't always have the full picture of the cases that we're talking about—why the exact delay has happened, what the causes of the different delays were, what took place—and the overall picture of people's situations.
To give an example, I've had clients who have been here since the age of three months. They were born and raised in Canada. They've lived in Canada their whole lives, and, but for a decision by a parent or somebody at different points in their lives, they would be Canadian citizens.
Those people, when we're talking about their removal, often will be in a situation where they have children, they have families, and they're very well established here. To a certain extent, the reasons for their engagement with the criminal justice system are very much a product of Canadian society, in the sense that these are people, aside from being born here, who essentially were raised within Canadian society. Their situation is not much different from anybody else who engages in the criminal justice system.
So in terms of saying that we're going to be removing these people as a solution to the problem, ultimately we're foisting this problem onto another community. Whether or not that's right in the circumstances is something that we have mechanisms within the act to look at: let's look at all the factors, let's look at the humanitarian factors that surround the particular case.
Are there extreme cases where this maybe hasn't worked, or where there have been problems? There certainly are. But the question I would ask with respect to the minister's examples is what solutions could there have been had these cases been looked at under the current regime? In my submission, under the current act there are plenty of mechanisms to have dealt with those issues within those cases.