Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank all the witnesses and the minister for being here today to answer our questions.
My first question is for the Minister of Public Safety, Mr. Blaney. It has to do with pardon applications.
Pardon applications have piled up over the past few years because the Parole Board of Canada, the PBC, doesn't have the resources needed to process them. You are probably aware of the issue. We're talking about thousands of applications that have accumulated, and the situation isn't changing. A PBC spokesperson mentioned that she wouldn't be able to allocate the resources required in 2015-16 to process all the pardon applications that have been pending for several years.
As you know, this has a real impact on our communities, and also on the efforts to socially reintegrate these individuals into our communities. Some of these people are being asked to withdraw the request and re-start the process whereas they have been waiting for an answer for years. Moreover, there are fees involved in applying for a pardon. There's no point in hiding it: often they are people with low incomes and their applications, which are fairly expensive, must be started over.
Does your government have a plan that would allow it to resolve the situation as quickly as possible? This situation doesn't affect just one riding. It's happening across the country.
Do you have a plan that would make it possible to grant resources to the Parole Board of Canada to resolve the situation, which is untenable for many individuals?