Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think they should focus more on the substance of the relationship. For example, knowledge of and familiarity with each other's families is something of substance that Canadians would understand. However, to wait so long and be refused based on your age is discriminatory and just doesn't make sense.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  But I will bring your attention again to the 40% rate of appeal acceptance at the ADR. I believe this demonstrates that the decisions the visa officers are making are not correct at least 40% of the time. In terms of the feeling that there is fraud in certain cases and discrepancy between certain officers, I feel that this is really a demonstration that there's a problem there.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The issue is the discrepancy. For instance, in Abidjan the refusal rate of 8% is far lower than it is in Accra. I think the focus on barriers within the country is only warranted to a certain degree. We have to focus on the discrepancy that I think is at the heart of the issue.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think one of the standard responses is that spousal sponsorships are prioritized, and that is the reason it takes so long. But I don't think that would—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Exactly, but that doesn't seem to justify the long wait time that exists. I just want to say also that it is the submission of Parkdale that when a couple is denied a visa based on the bona fides of the relationship for something as trivial as age, we feel that such decisions should no longer be made at the visa office.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. I would actually not agree with you there, because if you look at, for instance, the visa office in India, in 2008 alone there were 5,778 applications, yet the rejection rate was not nearly as high as in Accra and Nairobi. I feel that this demonstrates an inconsistency that really does need to be rectified, and I would actually like—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would agree with Elizabeth. My only concern is that we've seen how long a process takes with the processing of grandparents, where there are two stages, and the medicals and the criminal checks are not required in the first stage. I would just be worried that this would not encourage faster processing and that it would then provide maybe a little bit more of a reason to delay processing, which would obviously be a definite concern, especially when we're already waiting so long.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I do have refusal rates for all of the visa offices and there is this report I mentioned that talks about 40% of ADRs being successful. That does not include the immigration appeal division statistics. However, I believe it might be a bit difficult. There might need to be an information request done in order to find more specific statistics, but I do have a list of all of the refusal rates.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. They're very slow.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, exceptionally slow.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. In fact, that's what we were talking about in our submission. Parkdale Community Legal Services believes that this is simply not fair, especially when you look at the inconsistency in wait times across visa offices.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The Canadian Council for Refugees released a report yesterday. Their recommendation is to have more resources at visa offices. They talk about Nairobi processing so many files from different countries; I believe it's 18 different countries that the Nairobi office processes. That sort of statistic simply doesn't make sense when you think families are waiting for—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Do you mean the number of applications?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Elizabeth was mentioning that the appointment of board members has--