Hon. Donna Dasko: Thank you, minister, for being here. My question today is about Ukraine and the government’s efforts to assist Ukrainians in their terrible situation.

Between March 17 and June 8, your department received approximately 296,000 applications under the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel program, of which approximately 132,000 had been approved as of June 8. That would mean that fewer than half of the applications during that time period have been approved.

I would like to hear from you how you might speed up this process, what efforts are being made, and what your department is doing to deal with these applications. Thank you.

Hon. Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship: Thank you very much. With enormous respect, this program is something I’m incredibly proud of. This is a program that has now seen, together with other measures we put in place to expedite existing applications, well in excess of 30,000 Ukrainians make their way to Canada this year.

For a significant period of time, we were actually processing people on the two-week standard we had broadcast. There are some exceptions to that, of course, based on the individual case file, but there is not a big challenge in terms of processing these cases in an expedited way. The large delta that you see between approvals and applications is more a factor of the continued arrival of new applications in large numbers.

Something else that I’m watching very closely is the delta between approvals and arrivals. I visited the region — of course, not to Ukraine before our embassy reopened, but to Poland, as well as certain other European nations. We have heard that there are a significant number of people who are taking out, more or less, an insurance policy because they don’t want to go very far from Ukraine. They want to return home as soon as it’s safe to do so.

We’ve put everything into the system that we can to expedite the processing of these applications and, frankly, it’s working. I think this policy is an enormous success and may actually serve as the basis for temporary protection models in different circumstances into the future.

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