Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to the parliamentary secretary, I must say, first of all, since this government has been in power for over two years now, it is time he stop talking about the 13 years of Liberal government and blaming everything on the Liberals.
That being said, Bill C-50 poses a problem: it gives far too much discretionary power to the minister. It is a bad solution to a real problem. This real problem is the backlog of applications. The secretary said that 850 applications were delayed. According to the information I have, 24,000 applications have not yet been processed.
The problem is not that the minister does not make decisions quickly because she lacks sufficient power to make them. The problem is that there is a shortage of commissioners at the Immigration and Refugee Board.
This government has not appointed the necessary commissioners. As I said earlier, there are 156 vacant positions. More correctly, there are currently a little less than 50 vacant commissioner positions out of 156.
Two reasons account for this gap. First, the government has slowed the pace of appointments. Since coming to power, it has appointed only 27 commissioners. Furthermore, it has renewed almost none of the terms of commissioners whose terms have expired. Since February 2006, the mandates of only seven commissioners have been renewed. That is the real problem.
The government should perhaps begin by appointing all the commissioners that should be appointed. Then, if that solution does not work, it could perhaps give greater discretionary power to the minister or come up with other solutions—because giving greater discretionary power is not necessarily a solution.
Some people believe that the Conservative government does not want to appoint new commissioners because it cannot find enough people who share the Conservative ideology on immigration.