I've been dealing with refugees for over 16 years now. Unfortunately, the system in Canada would allow more bogus refugees than genuine refugees. The system needs to be looked at quite thoroughly. We are burned by that because the good people who are genuinely persecuted don't make it to Canada--number one. They are not allowed to go to any Canadian embassy and make a claim. They are prevented from doing that, which is a very bad thing to do.
When they are in Canada, who looks at them and decides that?The IRB, the Immigration and Refugee Board, and the panel members. Unfortunately, I have come across a number of them. I've been going there for several years. Some of these panel members know me and they invite me to give testimony by name.
I would tell you, from my firsthand experience, that a lot of these panel members are quite uneducated and uninformed, if not misinformed. They need to be educated. The mix of the panel members needs to be changed. You don't have enough representation out there to make the right decisions. This was reported a number of times to the ministers of immigration, and unfortunately the changes that we see here are dealing with numbers; they are not dealing with human beings.