Mr. Speaker, I should have pointed out that the riding of Kitchener--Waterloo and Waterloo in particular is the home of the BlackBerry which everyone around the world is enjoying. It is a great place to live.
The question the member raised essentially underlines what I said. We need to somehow make citizenship and immigration as non-partisan as possible. It does not serve anybody's purpose to make it political, because what ends up happening is a department that is in drastic need of reform. There is no question about it. Previous ministers have mentioned that. It probably is one of the toughest departments we have. Nothing illustrates that better than the point the member has just raised.
We had a private member's bill in the last Parliament that was actually sponsored by the Conservative Party. It had a different way of dealing with visas in terms of people who have relatives overseas. We had debates in this chamber about sponsoring them by signing a surety. It is a system that already exists in our court system when people guarantee that they are going to appear.
Before that there was a private member's bill sponsored by members of the Liberal Party. Politically, this should be something we all agree on. Where does the problem come from? I suggest the problem really comes from the bureaucracy and they find all sorts of reasons that this should not happen.
I remember my colleague from the New Democratic Party talked about the cases dealing with visitors visas, when somebody needed to come here because somebody was dying, or a child was about to be born or a family was having a happy celebration. They are being systematically denied.
We have to find a better way to make it work. My colleague is totally right. We are missing out on a tremendous opportunity when it comes to tourism, because when a visitor comes to this country, the visitor may be visiting me, but all of a sudden I will turn into a tourist as well. I will go and see Niagara Falls again, not necessarily because I want to see Niagara Falls again, but because visitors to this country want to see Niagara Falls. It is their first time to see it. It creates a lot of activity.
We have to find a way of cutting through the bureaucracy. We have to come up with a policy which makes it much easier and much less frustrating for people whose family members want to visit them.