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That's because of his very last job as the Minister of state responsible for the Immigration Department. He was pushed aside by his party because of the political fallout following the revelation that he played a central role in allowing a fugitive to get a hold of a passport that should never have been produced. But, somehow all the checks and balances were circumvented, and that suggests corruption in the Department itself. So, being so closely associated with that type of improper conduct, you might think that Penner would want to distance himself from that Department right? Well, yesterday, as the Committee does with every witness, they asked him how he would fix all that is wrong with Immigration. Here's his rather interesting response to that:

Hon. Ashley Rocke
"In hindsight what would you have done differently in that department?"

Elvin Penner
"Well first of all and I do hope that I have an opportunity to discuss possible improvements that can be made in the department where at least a big percentage of these irregularities could be avoided, where I do believe I could contribute significantly to ideas of how to make those improvements with regards to specifically the permanent residency, nationality - more than anything else, but in hindsight seeing all these irregularities, I would have wanted somebody to have done an audit report for the years leading up to me being there so I had some document like this to look through to see where the weaknesses in the department were."

"Having seen now where the weaknesses really lie, before anything else If I were ever to have the chance again as the minister of immigration a lot of changes would be made, mostly of all technically where it would minimize a lot of irregularities, a lot of chances for persons to fraudulently produce documents and it would actually would be able to identify a person if they would have done something wrong, because it would all be recorded digitally. So, like I said I believe if I do have a chance in the future to talk about it and I would be more than happy to advise or give suggestions that could be done so that we don't ever see a book like this again in our life."

Penner is expected to return before the Senate next week Wednesday.