Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the member could comment on the component where the minister can say that someone is an irregular arrival. He is referring more to arrivals by boat, but it also applies to individuals who would land at any of our airports.
Someone who is labelled as an irregular arrival could be detained for up to a year. After that detention there would be a five-year waiting period before the person would be able to sponsor someone. A 26-year-old man who has left a country where his life was threatened and has managed to escape that country would be waiting years. It would be five or six years before he could even put in an application to sponsor someone, his child, for example, which could then take another five or six years. His six-year-old child would be 17 or 18 years old by the time the child arrived here.
I wonder if the member could comment in terms of the fairness of that aspect of the legislation.