Thank you for that question. I think your colleague, Ms. Rempel, actually raised the key to this problem in the first half of this meeting, in that the delay times and the understaffing of the IRB drive the demand for these irregular crossings. I addressed earlier the problem of irregular crossings. There should be no need for irregular crossings. We should create legal pathways. There would not be public outrage if people were presenting themselves at legal crossings.
Yet we know, from work in Europe and from anecdotal evidence in Canada, that one of the factors that attracts people to present themselves for asylum, even if they are part of the 50% who are not legitimate asylum cases, is the knowledge that, due to understaffing, there's enough time to earn back their investment in this return. We know from the experience of other countries that staffing up our authorities enough to reduce the delay times—because the backlog is entirely due, as far as I can tell, to understaffing—would reduce the demand.
That would lead me to suggest that if this was approached as an emergency issue, it could be approached as a temporary emergency issue. If we could have a sudden five-year period of massive restaffing of these administrations, it might not be necessary in the future to have them staffed at that level. The emergency restaffing would reduce delay times enough to push the demand back down, if I can put it so crudely.
Rather than look at this as an incremental systemic change to institutions, maybe it should be approached as a one-time crisis measure.