Mr. Speaker, he has made an absolutely good point. I have a document from the citizenship board that states how many claimants from various countries have applied.
As for the ministerial permit that my hon. colleague talked about, a couple of years ago in the citizenship committee I tried to get the reasons behind why those permits were being issued. The Liberals manipulated the committee and gave no reasons.
As of today, a new report has come out on the number of permits issued by the minister. He answered the question here and he may be right that the problem could be a genuine case. However Canadians have the rights to know the reasons for these permits being issued. The government should make it transparent and tell us why these permits are issued, not just issue them. We need to have the confidence that claimants who are criminally ineligible are not allowed to enter the country.
We need a transparent system whereby we know why the minister has issued permit for these individuals. I hope the message gets out to make this a transparent system.