Madam Speaker, the problem with political appointments is that when the government switches, it tends not to want to reappoint those from its so-called enemies. In this case, when the Liberals were tossed from power, with the Gomery inquiry and all the rest that we all remember so fondly and that was brought up, surprisingly enough, by the government yesterday, the government that came in did not reappoint them, nor did it appoint its own cronies.
This is the problem with the government having a system, whereby it has an appointments process that is politically directed, where friends get to be put on boards, sometimes with great compensation for little work. There are hundreds of these and some of them actually matter, such as the IRB. So when the government did not replace these folks, the backlog came back again and now we have to have measures to deal with that.
Some have now since been replaced, but the fundamental thing is balancing the needs of speed, of getting folks through the system with some sense of fairness. Part of our concern is that with the speed, there are not the resources available, particularly with those who do not have a lot of money, such as a typical refugee, to be able to get though the process fairly and receive good treatment.