Mr. Speaker, I have worked with the member on this matter.
When the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was adopted in 2002, it had very strict provisions for inadmissibility that have long been established in Canadian immigration law and are basically endlessly retrospective. Therefore, anyone who belongs to an organization that may have been inadmissible in the past is still technically inadmissible.
Having said that, we have issued an operational bulletin to our visa officers and CBSA agents indicating that the African National Congress is an organization that has undergone substantial change and, therefore, membership in it should no longer be considered grounds for inadmissibility.
I think we have found a technical solution, but we are also looking at amendments to IRPA to correct this problem of the retrospective inadmissibility provisions of that statute.