Chair, if I may, we haven't received new funding for service standards per se, but we do have additional resources that are being used for federal skilled workers under the action plan for faster immigration. It has had that effect actually. Resources were put in to reduce the backlog of applications we had. We've seen a pretty dramatic improvement, actually, a big reduction in the backlog for federal skilled workers. It peaked at about 640,000 cases, and it's about 340,000 now, so it's gone down quite dramatically. For the new cases that are coming in, we're able to respond within that six- to twelve- month period, which we think is a reasonable time in which to do it. That has come about essentially through applying controls on the front end of the application process. It gives us a more manageable group of applications to deal with.
On November 29th, 2010. See this statement in context.