Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's really not so much the issue from our point of view. It really depends on the annual levels plan and how many cases are in each category. We're trying to balance that. If there are 17 different categories in the levels plan, about how many will any government try to balanc

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, we've always known what it would take. I don't have a rough number in mind. As I say, that really wasn't the issue for us. It really was how many people do you want to admit, and we will process them.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Not specifically. As I say, that really wasn't the issue for us. It was how many people are to be admitted under the federal skilled worker category.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The first question for us was the levels. It starts with the levels.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, we do work with HRSDC in and around labour force projections when we—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, there are a lot of limitations to what we have available in Canada in terms of labour market information. A lot of the data we have and HRSDC has is national in character. It's not very good at a regional or a provincial level. Some provinces have done their own analysis.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, that's correct.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We had gotten up to a period of about 60 months, five years or so, and increasing as the backlog continued to build. That's what happens when you develop a queue and the incoming volume is higher than your output. The backlog grows, and the processing time increases as a result.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  From the department's point of view, given Canada's attraction as a source country for immigration—so a lot of people want to come to Canada—we really cannot manage an open-ended application system. We have to control application intake, or we end up with unmanageable queues and

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, I'll just start off and maybe you may want to come back to it later. Essentially it's a system that allows us to do processing anywhere in the world, so for us it is a complete game-changer. It is helping us on the road to move, at some point in the future, to a total

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, we have. We estimate it will cost us $15 million over the next two to three years to issue those refunds.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The federal skilled worker backlog peaked at about 640,000 cases. As has been noted, the new ministerial instructions authority allowed us to use a number of measures to reduce application intake so we could focus on the applications we already had. The first thing we did there w

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We had estimated that if the intake had continued to be open-ended the backlog would have risen to about one million.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In excess of ten years, certainly.