Absolutely, I can do that.
My number one recommendation for improving the system would be to expand the category of people who can apply for refugee protection while still living in their own country. As I said before, you can't be a refugee if you're inside your own country. The only other way would be if you are in the source-country class, which has only six countries on it. Uganda is not one of them. This needs to be expanded. It could be done either by amending the legislative definition of convention refugee abroad class, or by expanding the source-country list. So you could add more countries to it, for example. That's one recommendation.
The other thing is that you could increase the government-imposed quotas for government-assisted refugees, or GARs. Right now, I believe the quota for Nairobi is something like 1,000 per year. If you imagine all of the refugees in Kenya, that's really just a drop in the bucket. Increasing those quotas would go a long way.
Also, increasing the quotas for privately sponsored refugees, which would allow people who have sponsors in Canada...it would allow more numbers, and things would go a lot more quickly. That makes a great deal of sense when you think about it. These people are sponsored by organizations or people in Canada who are guaranteeing a financial commitment for these people. So there's no downside risk for anyone. You get to save someone's life and at the same time it doesn't cost the public anything.
The Nairobi mission needs to be resourced more effectively. It's one of the busiest missions in the world for Canada, if not the busiest one, possibly. They're trying to do a lot of different things and process a lot of different cases, with no increase in logistical support. I think they need that. Training would also be part of that, training the officers properly in refugee law.
Finally, the application procedure should be simplified. If someone in a refugee class sends in an application that for some reason is incomplete, instead of just sending it back to them and waiting all that time, maybe we should just request the missing documentation, so that they don't lose their space in the queue. You can't overestimate the difficulty that people have and the amount of time that's lost in sending things back and forth.
You also asked about Bill C-49. I'm glad you asked me about that, because I love to tell my views about that bill. What you said was correct. Bill C-49 has been pitched to the public as a method of deterring human smugglers. When you say it like that, it's motherhood and apple pie. Who doesn't want to deter human smugglers? They're the scum of the earth, they're organized crime, blah, blah, blah.
The problem is, if you actually look at the bill, many provisions of it are punitive to refugee claimants. I'm not talking about bogus refugee claimants; I'm talking about people who are totally legitimate. For example, one of the provisions is that if you are designated as one of these group arrivals, which is arbitrary, really.... What difference does it make if you're a refugee who came on a boat with other people or if you came on a plane by yourself? It's arbitrary. If you're in that designated group, even if you're accepted as a refugee claimant and you're found to be totally credible and everything you're saying is true and you would be in danger...you're going to be prevented from bringing your family members to Canada for a period of five years.
I fail to see how that punishes human smugglers. That punishes refugees, and that is not right. I also think that a lot of these provisions will not withstand a constitutional challenge.