Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her question. I am pleased to have an opportunity to talk about Canada's asylum system and the other subjects my colleague raised.
Although we are always endeavouring to find new ways to enhance our system, I could not disagree more with my colleague when she describes our asylum system as defective and broken. On the contrary, Canada has been proud to provide refugees with assistance and protection for a long time.
Members will recall that Canada recently welcomed more than 40,000 refugees fleeing dire circumstances in their home country. We are going to continue to welcome refugees from many different countries around the world.
The Syrian refugee resettlement initiative was a national project that was embraced by Canadians across the country, to whom we owe a debt of thanks. Canada's system is highly respected around the world as a fair, safe, and efficient model. In fact, our approach has attracted a great deal of interest.
When the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, visited Canada last year, he hailed our private refugee sponsorship program as a model for nations around the world. Canada then joined the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the University of Ottawa, the Radcliffe Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations to launch the global refugee sponsorship initiative, a joint initiative to increase private refugee sponsorship around the world.
This joint initiative will help more refugees resettle around the world by enabling states, civil society groups, the business community, and individuals to launch private sponsorship programs based on the Canadian model. I believe that private sponsorship, which has worked so well in Canada, can produce results in other countries and save more vulnerable people around the world.
Even though our refugee system continues to respect Canada's longstanding humanitarian tradition, we are sparing no effort to make this system as efficient as possible and anticipate making further improvements to ensure it continues to garner respect around the world.
For example, we made investments to improve our system in budgets 2016 and 2017. I can assure the House that the government is concerned about the backlogs raised by my colleague and that we are working very hard to resolve the situation. For example, the IRB recently announced initiatives to reduce the backlog and expedite application processing.
As I have said before in the House, we have launched an independent review of the IRB to find ways to improve its productivity.
We are determined to improve our immigration system and we will get there by working together. That has been our government's approach from day one and I think that Canadians understand that our immigration system has a bright future.