As you know, Mr. Chairman, in the past when we had serious challenges to the integrity of the immigration system because of large waves of unfounded claims from particular countries, we had only one tool in our tool kit, and that was visa imposition. A good example of this would be the difficult decision I had to take in summer 2009 to impose a temporary resident visa on Mexican nationals.
Mexico, of course, is a very important trading partner, friend, and ally of Canada, and therefore it was not desirable to have the burden of a temporary resident visa on Mexican nationals, but we had received over 1,000 asylum claims a month from Mexico in the first six months of 2009. About 90% of them were ultimately deemed unfounded claims by the adjudicators at the Immigration and Refugee Board. So something had to be done because this wave of unfounded claims was creating a huge backlog in our asylum system, and frankly, was massively undermining the integrity of our immigration program. The only thing we could do was to impose a visa. Quite understandably, Mexico reacted negatively to this imposition of the visa and continues to raise this as an irritant.
I know you are the chairman of the Canada-Mexico parliamentary association, and you hear this all the time from Mexican legislators and government representatives. That is partly what motivated us to pursue fundamental asylum reform so that we could have other tools in the tool kit to address unfounded waves of asylum claims apart from visa imposition.
The success of the new fair and balanced asylum system will allow us, in due course, to more responsibly consider visa liberalization—I've been explicit about this—including Mexico. That's not a guarantee or a timeline towards a Mexican visa exemption. We want to continue to monitor progress in the new system. But at least so far the indicators are very positive.
Let me just add that the new asylum system, plus our planned introduction of an electronic travel authorization system in 2014 or 2015—I hope the former, not the latter—will together massively increase our options apart from visa imposition. The ETA, the electronic travel authorization, will be a light, online, virtual screen for people who might not otherwise be qualified to come to Canada. This is what Australia has done, the United States, and certain European countries. Those two reforms together will, I think, allow us to pursue a policy of visa liberalization quite broadly.