Finance committee  Those fees, of course, will be refunded.

Finance committee  There is no limit on intake. There is always a limit on output.

Finance committee  I would agree. Part of the ethos behind moving in the direction that the department is taking, that the government is taking on immigration, is to have a system that's somewhat more active in terms of recruiting and not passive in terms of accepting all applications. So we do wa

Finance committee  It will typically be six to 12 months.

Finance committee  We did legal analysis at the time we were looking at this particular provision, and there was a legal risk analysis done. Certainly it's one of the considerations that gets fed into policy development and legislative development. So, yes, it was taken into consideration, but ther

Finance committee  These particular changes? I would say that the genesis of a lot of the changes that feed into how we're dealing with the backlog is at least 10 years old, definitely.

Finance committee  This, I would say, is a provision that has been examined in the context of trying to deal with a better management of our application intake over a number of years, absolutely.

Finance committee  It's the decision of the government as to how to proceed, there's no question about that. There is also a monetary feature attached to this because refunding those applications is $130 million, which is part of the budget bill.

Finance committee  Are you speaking just with respect to these provisions?

Finance committee  No, and privacy is a consideration that we take very seriously on all policy development. So generally there's a privacy impact assessment done on new policy—

Finance committee  Yes, and we have information-sharing agreements with provinces and territories, etc. So it's a serious consideration.

Finance committee  The oldest portion of the backlog is 280,000 people, about 100,000 applications. There will remain in the inventory approximately 160,000 FSW applications. Those would be applications that have come in since ministerial instructions were put in place in 2008.

Finance committee  No, the oldest application could date back to, I think, about 2003.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  David knows that.