Mr. Speaker, the fact is that this government inherited a system that was a complete mess from the previous Liberal government that had played the game of , “We promise you a spot. We promise you a job in Canada. Just sign up and we'll get it processed”. It just did not happen.
We have had a number of years now where we have had to deal with the problem. It has grown. We made a decision, as a government, that we would reassess the foreign worker program, that we would redo it, start it over again and allow people who want to reapply to do so right away and have their application processed in a timely manner. It was completely unfair to keep hundreds of people on a waiting list that was not getting any better because of the previous government's mismanagement of the file.