Madam Speaker, as I said, when our embassy is able to go fully back to work we will assess whether there are urgent cases in need of prioritizing. An example would be people who have been victims of violence. Let us say a Canadian citizen has a relative who has made application for family sponsorship and the relative had been subject to violence or is in some form of particular risk. In such cases, we would typically give priority consideration to those applications and accelerate them.
We have done that on a wide-scale basis in the wake of large natural disasters, such as the southeast Asian tsunami, the Pakistani earthquake, the Chinese earthquake in Sichuan, as well as the more recent typhoons in the Philippines. We have sometimes created special programs and additional resources to accelerate processing of applications, for example, family sponsorship in those cases.
This is a little different because the definition of a refugee in both our law and in international law is someone who has fled his or her country because of a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of religion, political opinion, gender, ethnicity, et cetera. People who might be on one side or the other of the political conflict in Egypt, but who are still in Egypt, are not considered refugees under our law. It is only if they flee and, if they were to flee in significant numbers, typically we would work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other countries to seek a durable settlement or solution for them. However, that is very hypothetical and I, frankly, hope that it does not come to that in Egypt, and I do not believe that it will