Mr. Speaker, people cannot get a Canadian passport until they get their Canadian citizenship, so if they are waiting for three years to get their citizenship and their country of birth passport has expired and they have an emergency and have to leave Canada, that means they are obligated to get the passport renewed by their country of birth. That is costing people time, money, and resources, because the government has not been able to reduce the processing period for citizenship. Those are the types of real issues people are having to deal with because the government has been negligent in terms of processing times for citizenship.
Another example is the provincial election in Ontario. Whether it is the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, or British Columbia, there have been tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of individuals who have not been able to vote in provincial elections, because the government has allowed the citizenship processing time to hit that two to three year mark. If the government had done its job and kept that processing time to 12 months or less, we would have had more Canadians participating in our democracy. There are hundreds of thousands of people who call Canada home and qualify for citizenship, and the government's priority has not been to try to get into the hands of those individuals their citizenship.
Even by the minister of immigration's own admission, this bill is designed to reduce the processing times. We did not need legislation to reduce the processing times. It might help, but we did not require the legislation to do it. What we require is that the minister and the government have the political will to reduce processing times for citizenship. Although the current minister of immigration would argue that we have a huge demand of 333,000, some of the lowest demands on the citizenship branch in the last 15 years were while the former minister of immigration, his colleague, was responsible for the department and the processing time was making its greatest jumps. Therefore, the argument the minister of immigration was using this evening is bogus. That is the reality.
The reason we have the legislation in the first place, the government and the minister of immigration will tell us, is that it is all about reducing processing times, at least in good part. I would argue that the minister has not. That is why I suggested at the beginning of my comments that what the government is good at doing is talking about fixing problems, when what it does not tell people is that the problems it needs to fix are the problems it has created. The biggest problem for the government is that it creates problems in immigration, whether it is the processing times for citizenship or issues relating to the temporary foreign worker program.
The Liberal Party did create the temporary foreign worker program, but the problem was created from that government. We did not have a problem. We did not have the calls that we have today.
When the Liberal Party was in government, the average was about—