Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her kind words.
Earlier in the debate this afternoon, we heard from the Conservatives that they were making progress, they claimed, on dealing with the backlog of applications and the problems in the immigration system. However, as a member of Parliament from an urban area that has a large immigrant population, I have not noticed that.
I think every urban member of Parliament here has found that their offices are under considerable strain from the sheer volume of casework associated with problems with the immigration and refugee system. We are inundated with immigration casework. In fact in most of our offices, we have had to hire one person to do nothing but immigration casework. For many of us, it feels as though the department has offloaded a lot of the services that it should be offering people who have problems with immigration applications onto MPs' offices. We found this in all parties; it is not just a phenomenon for New Democrat members.
One of the solutions we came up with, in discussing this with my colleague from Hamilton Centre, was to propose the institution of an office of an immigration ombudsperson. It would be modelled on the office of the worker advocate in Ontario, which dealt with a similar situation around worker compensation claims in Ontario. MPPs' offices were inundated with those kinds of casework issues and found that the work they did in their offices was overwhelming, so this was hived off into an advocacy situation in an ombudsperson's office.
I know the member has had experience as a constituency assistant and has an office up and running. I wonder if she could comment on that situation.