That's a very good question.
As I acknowledged in my opening remarks, the tool has not been as flexible as we had hoped it would be when the class was created in 1998. The list has not been reviewed on a very regular basis. The last time it was reviewed was in 2003, and there were no changes made to it.
The regulations stipulate that to be on the list, a country has to be in a situation in which the entire country is a refugee-like situation. Also, to be on the list, the country has to be—and this is the paradox, even though it's in a refugee-like situation with a civil war and armed conflict going on—safe enough for Canadian immigration officials to go in there and work on a routine basis without putting either themselves or the people they're trying to help at risk. There are very few countries in the world that meet those criteria. It also has to be a country that wouldn't undermine our broader government agenda strategies within the United Nations.
Afghanistan is not on the list because Canadians can't routinely work in Afghanistan and Iraq is not on the list because Canadians cannot go into Iraq, yet those are countries that, at first blush, would appear to have one of our largest refugee populations.
It has been difficult to change the list. It does require cabinet approval. It goes through the regulatory process and therefore requires several government departments to agree. There's a broad consultation. Quite frankly, there are countries on the list now that we know could come off, but we don't want to waste the valuable time of members of parliament by taking countries off when we couldn't add any new countries to the list because the countries that people would want to add today are not countries that we can operate in.