I think part of the problem is we're bringing in very large numbers. If you're bringing in large numbers, it's not going to be possible to process them quickly.
I lived in an age in the 1980s, when I was in charge of immigration. We had immigration officers abroad. They were usually equipped with a security officer who would do the security checking. All of the people coming were interviewed and counselled face to face by an immigrant visa officer. In the case of spouses and the case of family, grandparents and parents, they were seldom interviewed. They were simply processed very quickly. If they met the medical requirements and the sponsor met the requirements for sponsoring people, they were dealt with quickly. That was a different time. Now we're dealing with up to 300,000 people in a variety of countries around the world.
Processing has been cut, if you can call it that. Now very few of the immigrants coming here, even the ones in the so-called economic class are interviewed. The interview is skipped and the documents that the immigrant files are sent to Ottawa. A civil servant looks them over. If they look pretty good they stamp them and send them back to Dhaka or wherever and the immigrant gets on the next plane to Montreal or Toronto. They've never been seen by an immigration officer. The system has been sped up but it has lacked the kind of ability, I think, to deal with the numbers.
In my own view, the family class, parents and grandparents, should be given a priority. Bear in mind what I said about costs: it's going to cost, and the taxpayer will deeply resent it if they see parents and grandparents being brought in from other countries when their tax load is being increased and they're going to be paying. That's what the politicians have to worry about. Fortunately, I don't have to.