Mr. Speaker, it will be interesting to see who answers the question. I was somewhat hopeful that it would be either the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism or the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration because I have been raising a very serious issue. Not only was it a number of months ago that I raised the issue about services, but I have been talking about this issue as recently as the last few days in the House.
There is a great deal of concern from residents across this land, from coast to coast to coast, in regard to how long it is taking to acquire citizenship. Back in 2005, the Liberal government committed close to $70 million to speed up processing times for individuals who met the residential requirements and wanted to get citizenship. I have no idea what the government has done with that money. What we do know is that the processing times have gotten worse and worse every year. This is completely unacceptable. We want the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism to deal with this issue. He seems to be more preoccupied and focused on his potential leadership ambitions or whatever it might be, as opposed to dealing with what is important to Canadians. What is important to Canadians is to speed up the unacceptable processing times to get citizenship.
We are not interested in the rhetoric from the government. We want to see tangible action. What is the government going to do to speed up processing times for citizenship? It is not acceptable that it now takes two years and longer, especially if people want the residency test applied. Then we are talking four, five or six years before people can get citizenship.
I appreciate that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration is somewhat aware of the issue. The minister addressed it when I first asked the question, and the parliamentary secretary addressed it the more recent times I asked this question. He needs to be straightforward with residents. We are talking about more than 300,000 residents all across Canada who have been waiting in excess of two years to get their citizenships processed. That is just not good enough.
The question I would now pose to the minister is the same question I posed last Friday. Will the government acknowledge that it needs to speed up the processing time for people applying for citizenship and agree to have a specific target of less than a year as a goal? Is he prepared to make that commitment today?