Afghanistan committee  I'm in the same situation as Mr. Shariff. I'm not up to date on that particular aspect of a public policy for the minister.

Afghanistan committee  My opinion is to follow policy and not implement policy, so I would defer to the authorities in immigration. They would be best placed to decide. Thank you.

Afghanistan committee  I'm going to have to defer that to the immigration authorities who are the experts on that, because certainly we have seen how complicated it can be to get people through the system. We want to make sure that we get the right people through the system.

Afghanistan committee  If I understand the question properly, the ramifications were a loss in physical presence in the country. We are no longer able to physically process people for the immigration program. As a result, we did send people back in as long as we could, but the pressure on the airport,

Afghanistan committee  Thank you, Honourable Member Kwan. It's an excellent question that is hard to answer, because while we're at the coal face, we're not able to see so much of what people are doing in other countries in getting people to third countries to process. I do know that the complication

Afghanistan committee  Thank you very much, honourable member Brunelle-Duceppe. On the 15th of August it was a very chaotic day. When we actually were preparing to leave to go into the airport compound, it was evident that a lot was going on. We could hear explosions. We could see fires all over the

Afghanistan committee  Thank you very much, Chair. To recap quickly, in 2013, there was an immigration program, a special program, for interpreters with the Canadian military. That program ran its course. When I arrived in 2014, it appeared that there were those who had missed out and had appealed f

Afghanistan committee  I can't say how many we would have got out—

Afghanistan committee  —but there may have been an opportunity to get some more people out of the country at that time, yes.

Afghanistan committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. On the documents required to leave, the SIMs process was quite straightforward in terms of documentation. We realized early in the game that we needed to come up with a mechanism. It was actually IRCC that came up with a mechanism called the “single journey

Afghanistan committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair, back in 2013, there was actually another special immigration program for former interpreters with the military.

Afghanistan committee  When we made the decision to evacuate on August 12, as I said, that was based on information we got from other sources. We had actually started the process for SIMs beforehand. We were looking at removing those who were associated with the embassy as being immediately identified

Afghanistan committee  Planning in terms of the SIMs policy itself actually went back into March, where we were working with IRCC to come up with a plan for how to introduce a new public policy for special immigration.

Afghanistan committee  Thank you. Essentially, when we started, we raised the flag back in the fall. Actually, the flag was first raised on the assumption that we were facing a big climate crisis. Drought was becoming quite profound, so we started pushing forward in regard to how to start dealing with

Afghanistan committee  Thank you. It's a complicated situation, because we were actually dealing with a lot of countries all trying to get out at once. The U.S. had a lot more people on the ground, and I'm not sure if the numbers that are quoted actually include a lot of their own people who are alre