Mr. Speaker, the member across is a parliamentary secretary. He was at the committee meetings, I just read some of the minutes, and heard from experts. I am not sure what he actually listened to. Sometimes he is a pretty good listener so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
I never said that a thousand days, on average, for refugees to get processed was acceptable. I think a refugee is actually lucky if he or she is able to get his or her papers in order in 1,000 days and get acknowledged. My office is seeing people who have been here five, six, even seven years, and there is still no progress.
There is no question that the system needs to be improved. However, the problem is this bill, in particular, would give too much power to the minister and putting these refugees in detention for years on end is going to cost Canadian taxpayers thousands and millions and billions of dollars, as the Conservatives would say.
The parliamentary secretary just said some of these refugees would be processed within 45 days. If some of them do get processed in 45 days, more power to them. That is exactly what we want. That is how we want this system--