There are a number of factors. A few years ago there were 50,000 people in the backlog. When IRPA, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, was brought in, in 2002, we had a flood of applications in anticipation of that bill. Unfortunately, the bill as it was written requires us to deal with every single application, and some people put in more than one. So even if we have accepted an individual on their first application, if they've got two or three others in other streams or under related addresses or other names or whatever, we still have to go through and do the paperwork on each and every one. We have no control over the intake, the number of applications we receive.
It would be as if you had a policy to return every telephone call you received, but you could do it only in the sequence in which you received them. If you received a call from, say, somebody who called you five times, you would have to call them back five times. If you had a call from a family member on an urgent matter, it wouldn't matter. You would have to call them back in the order in which calls were received. So the system as it stands is totally inflexible. Not only does it not respond to our labour market needs, but frankly, it isn't fair, because it makes people wait for way too long to find out even if they're eligible to come. The really good ones have a tendency to go elsewhere, where they feel more welcome.