Those are very good questions.
The backlog used to be only about 50,000 people, which was turned over about three or four times a year, which was pretty reasonable. Since then, when we took over, it had ballooned to over 800,000. Part of the reason was that in 2002, when IRPA was brought in, there had been a lot of discussion and speculation prior to the bill's passing, which prompted a lot of people to suddenly flood the government with applications to come to Canada because they were afraid of changes to the act.
That flood of applications came in, but IRPA had nothing in it that would allow the government to cope with this flood. It required that every application be processed, and that's simply not pragmatic. You can't just keep pouring them in. We have no control over how many applications we get, and we certainly get more each year than we can possibly process. Frankly, even adding more resources, which we're doing--we could do that until the cows come home and it wouldn't be enough.
It's a fundamentally flawed system that requires us to process applications--duplicate applications, in many cases. We can only process them in the order we receive them, for the most part. It would be like building a hockey team under a requirement to take the first 25 people who applied, even if none of them was a goalie. That's the way the system is set up now.
It doesn't help us meet our economic needs as a country. It doesn't give us the flexibility to respond to changing times. It was actually designed in a time when there were too many people for too few jobs; now we're just the opposite. We don't have the flexibility to help the immigrants succeed by finding them jobs in their fields. It systemically needs changing.