Thank you, Madam Chair. I will be splitting my time with Member of Parliament Hallan.
Minister, you say, today, that the victims of the scheme and of the fraud will not be deported. I'm sure those victims, those students, are pleased to hear that, but we've heard about this whole situation for months now. People in the community, on YouTube and other media outlets, have known since last September. CBC picked up this news story earlier this year. All of these students have had deportation orders issued against them because the department realized their mistake. Their mistake was that they accepted these fake letters, and the department issued valid visas to Canada for them to come here.
Since then, those students have gone to school. They've been studying. Some of them started working. Some of them started a family here, got married and had children. They've essentially set down roots here in Canada, because this happened over several years. Then, when the department realized their mistake, it issued deportation orders. It was essentially a “shoot first, ask questions later” situation. It left the students with significant mental health issues because of the stress of that, and with financial issues as well, because they have already paid for their student fees and for everything else it takes to get to Canada, and now they're also paying immigration lawyers and others to be able to fight to stay here, when they were the victims of this whole scheme.
As I said, we've known this for months. Conservatives have raised this issue in the House of Commons. Our leader, Pierre Poilievre, had questions in the House of Commons about this issue. In this committee, we've had, at least three or four times, a motion that was presented to study this issue. Unfortunately, the Liberals and the NDP rejected that motion.
Minister, you've had the power this whole time to do what you're saying today. You had that power. Why didn't you do this before?