Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to echo the comments of the minister and Mr. Spengemann with regard to the condolences to Constable Davidson's family and friends, to the policing community in Abbotsford, as well as to the policing community across this nation.
Thank you, Mr. Minister, for being here, and thank you to your officials for being here.
I want to focus part of my questions on the immigration end of things in CBSA. Your government is committed to admitting nearly a million immigrants in the next three years. We've seen the impacts of Operation Syrian Refugees. We've seen the impacts, this past year, of illegal border-crossers.
Mr. Minister, you and I had some conversations at the immigration committee earlier this fall in which I suggested that the illegal border-crossers were causing significant pressures on staff, that the interview times had been reduced, that people weren't showing up for secondary interviews, that people weren't being located across the country, and that people were disappearing and were not able to be found. It caused some consternation, and people were curious as to whether public safety was at risk. You assured Canadians that public safety and national security were never at risk.
Although I would like to believe you, I'm not naive enough to suggest that this is completely the case. CBSA front-line officers aren't completely convinced of that, and neither are some members of the Canadian public.
Sometimes past behaviour is a predicator of future behaviour. A redacted version the CBSA's internal audit of Operation Syrian Refugees has been posted online. I've learned from those who have access to the unredacted version that there are some things that are somewhat troubling in there. Screening times have been reduced from 30 days down to 96 hours. Security screening was not done, or not done properly, in a number of those cases. Sometimes, the open source for screening was in fact social media; this was redacted from the document.
The audit recognizes that there were extreme pressures placed on the teams involved in Operation Syrian Refugees and that resources were working numerous hours of overtime in order to ensure the operation's success.
What is troubling is that removed from the report was the sentence that said there was a risk that the processing of Syrian refugees did not comply with key legislation or with the delivery instructions of OSR, which is the Operation Syrian Refugees program.
If that's the case, we know from CBSA's internal audit that the illegal border-crossers have caused interview times to be reduced from the normal eight hours down to under two hours, and that question 2 on the form for those coming into the country, about why they are seeking asylum in Canada, isn't even being asked.
With those things happening, Canada is expecting what some reports suggest will be a quarter of a million more attempted illegal border crossings.
My question, sir, boils down to where are you expecting the resources to come from to address both the increased levels of immigration and the increased levels of illegal border crossings? Front-line officers are telling us that this is having an impact on the normal flow of legal immigrants into this country. As my staff tell me and other MPs' staff tell them, the normal processes are backlogged significantly.
I'm just curious to know where in your budgets the resources are going to come from to try to meet the demands that we are being faced with in both the legal immigration process and the illegal immigration process.