Mr. Chair, it is an interesting question, because the relationship we have with all legislation is that we think that legislation is supposed to serve the best interests of Canada. At the time the legislation was passed by Parliament--and it did not happen yesterday; it happened, as the hon. member said, two years ago--the question was, can we bring greater efficiency? Can we reduce the backlog? Can we deal with the refugee issues, with the refugee questions in the fashion that would accelerate the process? One of the first circumstances that people were contemplating was how can we diminish this?
We put our minds to it and said that if this was one of the things that we were going to do, we would take a look at it. Is it a just system in that if someone makes an application, has it considered and perhaps it is turned down, does that person have an opportunity to appeal? Yes, to the Federal Court. If the decision is negative again, they can have a pre-removal risk assessment. They can appeal that too. Through all the course of it, they can put forward a humanitarian compassionate application. All of this indicates there is protection for those who want to make an application.
The other part of the issue is, are we doing the right thing with this for all Canadians? We said that we should ensure that we have resources in place, first of all, to process the applications in a timely fashion. By the way, this is the fourth of one of my priorities and the member knows this well. Let us do this in a timely fashion. Let us be proactive. Let us take a look at some of the causes.
One of the things we did in the interim, as the member knows, is we signed a safe third country agreement with the United States. It did not make sense to a lot of people that 55% of all the refugee claimants would come through the United States. The United States is not one of the refugee producing nations in the world. It is not supposed to be considered as such. I am not being sarcastic, but the member understands what I mean. That safe third country agreement eliminated a lot of the things at the front end so that we could deal with those that are in the system in a much more appropriate fashion. When I say appropriate, what does that mean?
How does the international community view Canada's immigration and refugee system? The United Nations says that Canada has the best refugee determination system in the western world. The member is right. He wants to improve something, but let me remind the member that what he wants to improve is already considered to be the best.