Thank you, Madam Chair, for recognizing me.
I also want to thank the Honourable Michelle Rempel Garner for thinking about these spousal cases. I want to wish Mr. Garner well with his surgery.
There might not be many people who recall the Conservative way of abolishing or diminishing or cutting the waiting list or backlog. I still remember, Madam Chair. It was the previous government, before 2015. If I'm correct, it was Mr. Harper's government, and that was a Conservative government.
Do you know, Madam Chair, what they did? The minister had a power. He came in one day—there were almost 250,000 applications in waiting—and do you know what he did? He came in, and with the press of one button he said that none of those applications would be considered and all those applicants who were waiting in line were gone.
I still remember because I was an MP when Mr. Harper was in power during the previous government. It was taking almost two to three years for a spousal case to process. In 2015, when the Liberals and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took over, they brought in a policy that every spousal case, 99% of them, would be cleared within one year.
It happened. Spousal processing time, which was from two to three years under the Conservatives, came down to 13 months. Sure, under COVID it went up, but now the minister is bringing families together. This is the first time. Last week, in fact, there was an announcement made by the Minister of Immigration. I had a very good discussion with him—