Madam Speaker, I do not consider the people who come to Canada to seek refuge to be queue jumpers. There are a lot of people who have come to this country, including a lot of people in the House, to seek refuge.
In his question, my colleague from Newfoundland mentioned queue jumping. Let us examine queue jumping out of Sri Lanka. These are spousal cases. People are sponsoring their wives. There are a couple of files that I would like to bring to the attention of the House.
A file was opened in my office on September 17, 2010. Today we received an announcement saying, “Please be advised that this application has passed on paper screening stage and is presently in queue for review”. The second one is dated March 11, 2011. To this day it is still in process. There is one from January 2011 and today we heard, “We are paper screening”. There is one from October 18, 2010, and we heard today, “Please be informed that this file has been paper screened and it is in queue to be reviewed by an officer”.
These are examples of people who are sponsoring their families, their wives and their husbands, and they are all from Sri Lanka. According to the minister's website it takes two months in the case processing centre in Mississauga and then it goes to Sri Lanka and it is supposed to be 13 months. These figures speak for themselves. It is not 13 months. It goes on.
If any member of the Conservative Party were to stand and say that he or she does not think the Conservatives are targeting the Tamil community, I have news for that member. When Bill C-4 came forward the Conservatives did not even have the kindness to reach out to the Canadian Tamil Congress.