Mr. Speaker, I am going to have to repeat a lot of what I said yesterday when I responded to the hon. member's questions because really none of it has changed.
What I did was give the facts. The hon. member accuses me of not answering the questions and only accusing him of rhetoric. That is not true. The hon. member should go back and look at and read the answer I gave him. I gave him many substantive points.
What I did say, and what we did admit, is that there are problems in the system. Anybody who is an MP knows there are problems with the system. That does not mean the system is falling down around our ears.
Of the 245,000 people who come into this country every year under immigration and refugee status, 80% of them have no problems. They come in, they come in easily and they begin to build their lives. They have settlement services, et cetera. Twenty per cent do have problems. Those problems, as I told the hon. member yesterday, are not necessarily and only of the department's doing.
The hon. member and his party across the way have always accused us of letting anybody into the country. They always accuse us of not taking the time to look up criminal records and find out who these people really are. During 9/11 they accused us of letting in all sorts of terrorists and so on.
We do have to follow through with due diligence in finding out more about the people who come into this country. It is not easy to get information in some countries and that is one of the causes of the time lag. Also, the department has many cases, and with family class reunification being expanded to grandparents and dependent children under 21, it is now inundated with more.
Each one of those cases needs to have verification of data, of fact, of birth, of simple things. In Canada and certain other countries someone presses a button on a computer and can get all of that data. In some countries, that data is stored in a village in such a way that we have to get somebody to find it. It takes time. Twenty per cent of the people who seek to come to this country need to get that kind of information followed through on and that often takes time.
We are aware that we could do things better and obviously everyone is trying to do that. I said to the hon. member yesterday that we would love to have his party's input into what are the very positive and creative ways in which we can make the system work better.
This is an evolving system. It does not stand still as more people come in from different countries where there are challenges with getting data from some of those countries and where there are a lot of difficulties. That puts a greater burden on the system.
How do we deal with those increasing burdens? That is a valid question. Instead of the hon. member being negative and constantly casting innuendo, I would like to hear him suggest some important and creative things that he and his party think we should be doing to deal with an extremely complex situation that involves very complex processes and finding very complex solutions.