Mr. Speaker, I try to be truthful on all occasions, so I am going to tell the member that she is absolutely wrong in both cases. I have not said that we should not do this. I have asked, what is the crisis? The definition for a crisis for me is something that bubbled up there that was not there before and that we have to deal with right now.
Second, in 2004, I was not the minister and when this was put together it represented all of the issues that everybody wanted.
Third, there are immigration lawyers, some more competent than others, and what is the recourse for satisfaction? That was the question that everyone wanted to have addressed by my predecessors. So many of the consultants at the time were actually lawyers. In fact, the first president of the immigration consulting group was a lawyer. As I said earlier on, the very first thing is caveat emptor. If one is in need and goes to where the price point satisfies, that is the kind of advice one is going to get.
I am not sure that one can make decisions for everybody. As I said, what happened at the time was that my predecessors, in their wisdom, put together an educational system in place for licensing that satisfied what committees in the House were telling them needed to be done and what stakeholders in the community wanted to have done. But I go back to the point that was most important. It was not that the process required the greatest urgency. The process represented what the substance; that is, what immigration was supposed to do for people. Was it going to lead out an opportunity for hope, for improvement for those who would immigrate, and was it going to provide an increased enhancement of a Canadian experience for those of us who were already here?
That is what everyone wanted to discuss. They did not want either the issue of consultants or of lawyers, or of anybody else doing things secretly outside the law or under the table. All of those things take away from that big experience, the experience of holding out hope to new Canadians, or those who would be Canadians, and greater ambition for those who already are through that process.