The intention, as I was saying in reply to an earlier question, is that once the instructions come into force, the existing backlog is going to be frozen. The bill provides that we have to deal with people who are in the existing backlog under the existing rules, so by and large, we're going to go “first in, first out”, and our current thinking is that we will allocate something like 70% of our operational resources to eating away at the backlog.
At the same time, we'll be writing, on a pilot basis, to some 50,000 of the older files asking whether they want to be sustained. As I told Ms. Chow, we would also be mining the files in order to determine whether any of them can be referred to the provinces. So we will keep eating away at the backlog. The key there, though, is that it's frozen. We're not going to be able to add to it.
On the working inventory file, where we hope to allocate something on the order of 30% of our ongoing resources, the ministerial instructions will be used to enable us to pick and choose those that reflect their priorities, and the files that don't meet those priorities will be returned to the individuals at the end of a processing period; it may be a year or it may be a year and a half.