Thank you.
Among the specific assignments you received in your mandate letter are those to support the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness in the continued work with the United States on the significant problems with the Canada-U.S. safe third country agreement, which brings me to the point of asylum backlog claims. Canada has recently set a record in the last few months with the asylum backlog claims exceeding 80,000 cases. This represents the largest number of unprocessed claims on record and the first time it has ever been this high.
Recognizing that the process time determines how large this backlog gets, and we see that the increased illegal irregular arrivals are still exceeding the number of processed claims, have your officials briefed you on the legislation passed by our previous government in 2012, which dealt with obviously probably unworthy asylum claimants to be processed within 45 days and allowed only one appeal before being removed from the country? That was effected, significantly reduced the cost to Canadian taxpayers and discouraged the number of unworthy claimants at that time.