Mr. Speaker, beginning with the fee, as I said to the minister, when the government has just bungled the job and doubled the waiting time, it is not the time to double the fee. That is totally unfair. Maybe if the minister halved the waiting time, as he has promised to do in some future period after the next election, that would be the time to raise the fee, but he should wait until he does it. He should not do it in advance on the basis of some promise that may or may not be realized. I agree that some of these people have a hard time paying the fee.
On the first question about people waiting for citizenship, it is a horror story. According to Statistics Canada, Markham happens to be the most multicultural community in the country, so 90% of my business is immigration related. We hear horror stories about people wanting to be reunited with their spouses, or grandparents wanting to come to the weddings of their grandchildren and being denied. Grandparent A is in exactly the same situation as grandparent B, yet one gets in and one does not, and nobody knows why.
For citizenship, some people have to fill out a form that adds two years to the wait time. The average is two and a half years, but it can be up to five years.
As I said in my speech, if the philosophy of the Conservatives is to scowl at newcomers, they do not care. If the Conservatives cared, they would have put money in between 2007 and 2012. The government would have put money in to prevent waiting times going from 16 months to 32 months, but it failed to do that. The government knew that it was causing waiting times to go up, and it neglected to put the required resources in. The government is utterly guilty of neglect.