Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for appearing before us today. I certainly found your testimonies to be very informative and very useful. Thank you for sharing your experiences with us.
This is a very important study for us. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the Honourable Chris Alexander, spent the better part of January of this year doing country-wide consultations on this issue and heard many of the same things that you have brought up today, quite frankly. We have enough statistics and information to know that there is abuse in our spousal sponsorship program and it is our intention as a committee to study this and this is why we're studying it. In our deliberations we felt it prudent to do a thorough study to see how we can make improvements to the system so that we can catch those who perpetrate abuse, particularly on women.
We've touched a little bit in your testimonies on marriage fraud and marriage of convenience. We don't have an awful lot of statistics on that information. But I can tell you through our global case management system—I think, Ms. Macklin, you brought it up—the first complete year of that available to us was 2013. In 2013 for applications sponsored under the spousal or partner class, there were approximately 2,200 refusal ground instances based on bad faith relationships. So, clearly, marriage of convenience and marriage fraud are things we would like to prevent from happening and eliminate if we can in totality.
Having said that, I don't want to take away from the fact that women are being abused and they have to have an avenue. They have to have a way of getting some assistance. Certainly the conditional permanent residence, the two-year conditional PR, was not intended as a way to make life more difficult for them although I fully understand the point that you made, Ms. Macklin, as have other witnesses who have appeared before us.
There's also the other side of the coin. There are women who sponsor men to come here and those men who come here can be abusive. We recently had a case right here in Ottawa. It was very public and was published in the newspapers, of a man who was sponsored to come here and no sooner did he get here than he started abusing his wife. In his particular case, he used the system to his advantage and he's still here, and he was the abuser. We want to try to prevent these things from happening.
I'll start with you, Ms. Marshall, because you, as the others I believe, spoke about informing people of their rights under Canadian law before they come here perhaps. I believe you mentioned signing a document attesting to the fact that they have a knowledge of what their rights are. That's a very important point. I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little for us, Ms. Marshall.