Mr. Speaker, I do agree with my hon. colleague. The average processing time is now 31 months, which is two and a half years. It used to be just over one year. These are the government's own numbers.
I should add that it could add a lot more time for some individuals who have to fill out the residency questionnaire, and it is a rather arbitrary and mysterious process by which it is decided who has to fill out the questionnaire and who does not, and we do not know according to what criteria. That is another element that can impose a huge burden on individuals in terms of the time it takes.
This is a general problem across the board. We are looking at a doubling of citizenship wait times but if we look at processing time for all components of immigration, whether it is family class, parents, grandparents, children, spouses, economic immigrants, provincial nominee programs, visitors, and citizenship applicants, all have experienced dramatic, sometimes two or three times higher, processing times under the Conservative government. Perhaps departments have been starved of funds, perhaps the government does not care, perhaps it has erected new bureaucracies, we do not know all of the reasons, but across the board it is totally unacceptable. This case of doubling wait times for new citizens is terrible but it is just typical of what the government has done across the board.