The proposal is in need of major infrastructure dollars so that you can build that housing, which, by the way, the Province of British Columbia, BC Housing, is in support of. A number of other NGOs in the community support this as well. If the minister hasn't seen the proposal, I'd be happy to hand that over to him in the House at a later date so he can take a look at it.
I do think that there can be a long-term strategy. Instead of investing dollars in hotels, you can actually build permanent housing that can be used over and over again whenever there's an influx. As the minister acknowledged, these are irregular crossers and they're coming to Canada according to Canadian law and in accordance with international obligations to which Canada is a signatory.
I'm going to leave that.
On the question of processing time, one of the issues is with the IRB. The IRB did receive two years of funding with $74 million for 2018-19, but with the rate in which the number of cases is increasing, which is up to 2,500 per month, that means the backlog is to the tune of 30,000 per year. This is significant in terms of the backlog. In order to get ahead of this, the government just tried to deal with legacy cases. We're actually creating legacy 2.0 right now, unless there are additional dollars provided to the IRB to clear this influx of backlog, because right now the claims are sitting there and it's taking at least two years to process them.
Will there be additional dollars provided to the IRB so that we don't create legacy 2.0?