Thank you once again, Mr. Brunelle‑Duceppe.
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the officials for being here.
I would like to follow up with concerns among the Sudanese community in the Waterloo region.
At a time when we know there have been 15,000 or more people killed and four million children displaced, leaders in my community are saying that they just want to see treatment similar to what they've seen for other countries. I'll share one example. The president of the Sudanese Canadian Association of Waterloo Region and Wellington County, whose name is El Bagir Abdulkarim, submitted applications for his brother and mother on March 2 and 6. There has been no response yet.
I've spoken with the minister about it. He shared with me what he shared with this committee, as well, which is that the standard processing time would be early 2025 and that we should be grateful things are being moved faster, to potentially fall of 2024. We know that other countries, like Ukraine, for example, have had processing times of 14 days.
Why is it that processing times for family members of Sudanese Canadians seem so much slower than for other countries?