Madame Chair, I'll try to be clear in my answer.
I think the honourable member is actually absolutely right in his analysis, in the sense that our goal and our business model is predicated upon the fact that, once we have cleared our large inventory of cases, we'll have a manageable carry-over from year to year of between 300 and 500 cases. We are now at 2,000. That's basically what we've carried over. We started the year at 2,500—it was 2,513. Now we are left with 2,049, having closed 2,125.
We are catching up and we are becoming more efficient. That is the plan. My concern at this point is how long it can take us to actually get to that manageable caseload. That's the concern I have. That's why I'm doing the analysis that I'm doing internally. It may be that, if we decide we need additional funding, it's only temporary funding to get us to that manageable carry-forward. That's part of what I'm looking at.
There are two other aspects, Madam Chair, to this question. The second one is that last year we also got significant funding to renew our information technology platform. Now, for our office this is very significant, because it's our case management platform but also our legal tracking system. This is our IT infrastructure that assists our investigation, that assists our monitoring of our performance, that assists us in identifying what's within our control and what the waiting times are for institutions to respond. This case management renewal that we are embarked on will also, in my view, generate efficiencies. We haven't fully realized those, so we're looking at that.
The third aspect is that because we have grown so significantly in the last year—in fact this year is the first year we have been fully staffed, which was the result of a very aggressive human resources strategy in September—