Minister, with all due respect, I appreciate those lines, but the reality on the ground is that people are experiencing funding cuts. Some of those organizations that you visited actually received funding cuts. There are programs that have been eliminated.
In spite of all this grand talk, the reality on the ground is different. This is what I'm telling you right now, with these specific case examples, and I have more to come.
Therefore, I want to raise this issue and I would ask you to go back and look at those numbers and talk with your officials to see how it is that those organizations received a funding cut when your department underperformed on the resettlement services, and particularly on the language training component. This is a real issue for many people on the ground. If we want people to be settled successfully, they need to be supported. The funding cut is not helping that.
Your ministry actually had resources. There were resources within your ministry and you underspent by $20 million. I'm going to park that with you, and we can have a further discussion about that.
I want to raise another issue with respect to this. Your ministry mandate letter specifically outlines, “continued work with the United States to modernize the Safe Third Country Agreement”.
I want to get clarity. When the government said “modernize”, a word that has been used previously, does that mean to say that the government is looking for ways to extend and expand the safe third country agreement?