Mr. Speaker, I think that, at some point, there was a snowball effect. They took a lot of time to decide how this process should work. They took a lot of time to implement various measures to change the way this process was working. There is no question that, during that period, the number of claims increased. In my opinion, there is also the fact that, since 2001, we have acted differently with refugee claimants. A kind of fear began to assail governments, including all North American governments, with the result that we started to act differently. Moreover, it may be that we acted in a harmful fashion, that we were too slow to respond to needs. When there is only one person who can process refugee claims, it creates a backlog. If we cannot deal with one claim, then it is two, three and ten. Now, we are finding out that tens of thousands of claims are waiting to be processed.
In the House of Commons on May 28th, 2007. See this statement in context.