Madam Speaker, I would like to answer the member's questions, but I just want to deal with a couple of things. I think there was a lot of rhetoric in the question; it was sort of in danger of a lot of heat and very little light.
I want to shed some light on it because I think there has been a tendency to ask questions of Ministers of Citizenship and Immigration with rhetoric, knowing full well that in many instances many ministers of this House cannot answer those questions because they are bound, especially in the cases of immigration and other areas, by the Privacy Act.
They cannot divulge why on the surface what seems to be a case that is not worthy of humanitarian and compassionate grounds really is, because they cannot give that data and that information without full consent of the client. The ministers are bound by not being able to give the right answers or to explain the situation properly. That leads to this kind of rhetoric.
What I think we need to talk about is that there were some statements made here which I really do want to respond to. One of them was that the hon. member basically said that many employees appear to be operating in survival mode with poor law and regulations to guide them.
I need to remind the hon. member, who has been a member of Parliament for as long as I have, that in fact these employees work under an act, an act of Parliament decided on by this Parliament. It was amended as recently as 2002 in this House, with debate, as an act of Parliament. People in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration do not suddenly work with nothing; they have a clear set of laws and a clear set of guidelines.
That brings us to the fact that the member talks about the problems he has in his riding. He is not alone. Every single one of us knows that we have problems in our ridings and every single one of us also knows that there have been times when members of the opposition and everyone else have brought cases to a minister of immigration, who has dealt with them, looked at the facts, realized something needed to be done and got humanitarian and compassionate grounds for those clients. This has not been done only for government or only for Liberals. It has been done for many members across the floor. We know this, so the question is, let us deal with the facts.
Fact one: we bring in about 245,000 immigrants a year. For 80% who come in, it is easy. They move in, they build their lives, they begin to contribute to Canadian society, and we never talk about them, because the ones we see are the complex cases . To suggest that there is a silver bullet and that a minister can suddenly come in and fix things in one fell swoop is not telling the facts as they really are and not even understanding the complexity of the issue.
We are dealing with human lives. We are dealing with people who live in countries, depending on whether they are refugees or not, and who have no papers. I recall that across this House this particular member's party has often accused us of bringing in people without due process, without digging deep and looking for all their papers and all their backgrounds. In many instances those papers and backgrounds are hard to come by. That extends the process. The process can take a long time in certain cases. We see the difficult and complex cases.
What I am saying is that our current minister and this government are very clear that we need to make the system work better. It is a changing and evolving situation that we live in with regard to immigration in our country.
We would love for this hon. member and others to come forward to help us resolve this problem and not throw cheap shots across the floor at us, because it is a complex issue. It is not a simplistic problem.
Let us deal with IRPA. Let us look at these things. We have worked in the House in 2004 and obviously situations have made it such that we are still having problems. Let us work on the process. It is not going to be fixed tomorrow, with the best of intentions. It will take time for some of these things to change because we are dealing with fluid situations and many different countries.