Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I, too, want to welcome all of our witnesses here today, and I am very glad that you've had the opportunity to bring your experiences to us. We've been very astute on our side here, talking about the tracking. My colleague, Ms. Rempel, was talking about that earlier, that we are very compassionate about making sure that there are opportunities for refugees in Canada.
I, too, was on that travelling committee in Africa in early June with several of my colleagues on the committee from both sides of the House, and that was a very good opportunity to see how our system works.
I know that all we're saying is that we just want to see a plan, a costed plan from the government on how the process is going to work. I think Ms. Damoff just made the point that they don't know where they are. You don't rely on the housing people in Toronto to find out where these people are. You do it through the refugee claimant system that comes into Canada, and then you keep track of the people as to where they are, so that they can go through the proper channels that we have in the system to become legal refugees in this country after they've crossed. There is no doubt about that.
I just want to say that anyone who doubts the compassion of anyone here needs to talk to me about it because I have refugees in my own family who have established here in Canada and have gone on to become great citizens, so I have no qualms about speaking out. Some of you talked about the quality of the individuals who are coming into the country. That's not the big issue. We just need to know what the plan is and where the government is at.
We've had testimony today from two ministers so far and a parliamentary secretary, and we're about to have testimony from another one, who have not even given us the same kind of definitive plan that we were able to get from the minister in Ontario. She knew how many dollars they were asking for and what the breakdown was. We haven't even been able to get that out of the federal government.
That's part of why we asked for this committee meeting, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here in the summer to do this.
One of the things we learned when we were in Uganda is that there are 1.4 million refugees in Uganda alone, out of 64 million refugees in the world. We are looking at almost twice the Canadian population, so this isn't about a resettlement process. A lot of those people don't want to leave their home countries. Most of them don't want to leave their home countries, but they've been forced to, as we've heard as well. I put that out there.
Part of our role in that process was to look at the visa application centres and their function. Whether they are student, worker, or visitor visas, there is a process that people go through there as well before they come to Canada. That's just one more benchmark, but that's through the legal process.
What we're looking at is having a study here that will deal with some of the situations that we're faced with on a day-to-day basis.
I appreciate the comments by Mr. Reichhold on how the system works for the corporate sponsorships, the private ones you were talking about, and also the grassroots groups, because I also know people who have taken it upon themselves in some of my own local communities—church groups, community groups, and towns in fact—to integrate refugees. I've been there with them when they have got off the plane to take them to their local communities and integrate them with work, getting the kids into school, and those sorts of things.
We've seen situations where there are problems in Quebec with day care in a number of those areas, and with getting them into.... There are time frames that we need to be dealing with.
Just in closing I want to say that I believe we need some kind of a process, and the visa application process is one. That's through normal channels, though, so we need to find a way for the governments to make it compassionate for those who are refugees who come into our country, and I don't think that the process we're going through now is the only answer for being compassionate. It's not compassionate to put them into areas where women and children are going to be housed for only a very short time, or to leave them out. First of all, they're in the cold in the winters. I think we need to be compassionate in those areas.
That's why I am asking for a report by this committee to Parliament so that the government can respond.
My colleague ran out of time on that, so I would just like to ask you the same question—