Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, our facilitation letters were exclusively for consular clients.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We fully support the idea of IRCC establishing an emergency response function. Afghanistan was a really good example of an international emergency that had huge domestic components as well, in that there was a massive immigration program that was being implemented. For us, as a federal group of departments that have emergency management structures, we've been spending a lot of time looking at how we can work more seamlessly with each other and how we build that capacity.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Every emergency is an opportunity to learn how to improve how we deal with emergencies, and Afghanistan was no exception. One of the key funding decisions in the fall economic update is that there are new resources for consular, and—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can speak to what's in place during a crisis, which is that Global Affairs Canada, as the lead department for international emergencies, will establish an interdepartmental task force that would have all the relevant departments at the table. In the case of Afghanistan, we met daily.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This is an excellent question. We surged resources into Pakistan, Doha and Kuwait, across all of that region, to be able to support consular clients and to support our partner department, Immigration, which was working on the SIMs program, and to ensure that there was safe passage to Canada for those entitled to come.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Our authorities of course fall under the consular mandate. When we were issuing letters of facilitation, which are a tool that we would sometimes use in a crisis scenario, these would be for Canadian citizens, permanent residents and their family members only. In terms of the individuals to whom we provided these letters, it was to resolve the very difficult situation at Taliban checkpoints.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No.