Thank you, Madam Chair.
Let me say a big thank you to our witnesses for appearing before us today.
As you can appreciate, this is a very important study for us. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the Honourable Chris Alexander, held some round table discussions on this very topic in the month of January of this year and heard things that were very similar to what we've heard from you today and from other witnesses who have appeared before us.
In its deliberations, this committee felt it was important to do a study on this subject. Clearly, there is abuse. There is a problem in the system, and we'd like to identify possible solutions. Some of the recommendations you made here today are certainly very important, and we will consider them as we conclude our study within the next number of weeks.
That said, we do have a challenge. There is abuse in our immigration system. There's a reason why the conditional PR was put in place in the first place. Its objective, of course, is to deter people from using marriages of convenience to gain permanent residency in Canada. That does happen. We have many cases of that happening.
Something needs to be put into the system to ensure that Canadians are protected and that there isn't abuse of our immigration system. At the same time, we're very cognizant of the fact that the different cultural backgrounds, as I think you mentioned, Ms. Madawa, with some very live examples, prevent women from properly disclosing that they are in an abusive relationship.
I'm going to direct my first question to Mr. Waldman.
Mr. Waldman, welcome back.