You're correct that the amendments will more formally introduce an in-person requirement. As you can imagine, prior to the pandemic the process by which a claimant would make a claim was always done in person. It was never necessary to put that in law.
Now that we're embracing the online mechanism, we need to be more clear in law to say that a claim is not considered made from the perspective of the law until the claimant meets with an officer to verify some of the integrity requirements from the IRCC's perspective. It's just for collecting their documents. It's just for verification that they're in fact in Canada, because that's a fundamental principle of why we provide protection to claimants.