Mr. Speaker, in December I asked the minister a question about the Immigration and Refugee Board. I would like to start off by congratulating an advisory group making recommendations to the minister for the work it did on that report, Mr. Roger Trempe, Miss Susan David and Dr. Roslyn Kunin,
One of the recommendations they made was to eliminate the Immigration and Refugee Board. The Immigration and Refugee Board is a national embarrassment to Canada right now. I could not agree with them more. What is interesting about it is that they make that recommendation, the minister puts out a press release congratulating them and a couple of days later she appoints a former Liberal member, Anna Terrana, to the Immigration and Refugee Board at a salary of $84,000 a year. We have to wonder how serious the government is in really looking at these recommendations.
The Immigration and Refugee Board has a 28,000 case backlog. Out of 21,000 people who have been ordered deported, there are 15,600 people left in Canada; 4,000 deported, 15,600 still in this country.
The people on this board make $86,400 each. That is the maximum. There are 198 members, $74 million a year. A good recommendation is to get rid of this board because it is not doing the taxpayers in this country any good at all.
There are 29,000 cases outstanding by the Immigration and Refugee Board. Eight-five hundred previously rejected are now under review. The average processing time for a claim is 13 months. Review of cases takes seven months. In reality the first processing of a claim takes two and half years.
Sixty per cent of the refugees who arrive in this country arrive without a passport or without identification. It costs about $300 million a year to keep these refugees on welfare and assistance.
It is time that this minister got serious about this board. The recommendations from her committee say that it should be cancelled. There was a great article this weekend by Anne Dawson of the Ottawa
Sun
. The chairman of the board, Mawani, refused an interview. So did the minister.
The public wants this board cancelled. It wants a different process. The Canadian people are fed up with what is happening with the refugee situation, people coming to our borders demanding status in Canada. They should have to apply from outside Canada like all the other people who come here. We hope the minister will take what the public wants, take what her committee is recommending and abolish this board.