Well, yes. In fact, I would again point out that we do not propose in this legislation to change the threshold for what constitutes serious criminality under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
In 2002 the previous Liberal government adopted IRPA, and at the time stated in the law that serious criminality was defined as those sentenced to a penalty of six months or more, or who were sentenced to a crime that could carry a maximum sentence of ten years or more.
However, in order I think to satisfy the immigration lawyers, they decided to allow for a delay tactic through an appeal to the IRB's Immigration Appeal Division. That delay tactic, and then a subsequent application for judicial review to the Federal Court, allows for foreign criminals convicted of serious crimes to delay removal by an average of two and a half to three years. That's two and a half to three years of time during which that foreign national, who has already been convicted of a serious crime by a fair Canadian court, can go on to commit additional crimes.
I think we have an obligation to the Canadian public to do everything we reasonably can within the law to prevent the opportunity for them to re-victimize new Canadians, and that's the premise of what we're doing. So yes, this does bring it into a sort of coherence with what I think is the basic framework of IRPA in terms of serious criminality.