Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.
In his last budget, the Minister of Finance announced that immigrants and refugees would have to pay a $975 tax to be able to gain permanent resident status in Canada. We have learned that the Mississauga processing centre alone rejected over 4,000 applications for settlement, between February 27 and April 28, because claimants could not pay that tax.
How can the Minister of Immigration, who pledged that no immigrant or refugee would be adversely affected by this new tax, explain that 4,000 applications processed in Mississauga were rejected for the sole reason that claimants did not have the means to pay that $975?