That's a very broad question to answer in just five minutes, but I'll do my best.
We're taking a three-pronged approach to overhauling, improving, and modernizing the immigration system in Canada. The first is to manage the process, manage the system itself; the second is to make some administrative changes; the third is additional resources.
We've included $109 million in additional resources, because we need more people—everyone has a certain capacity. But money isn't enough to fix a fundamentally flawed system. That's why we're looking for these legislative changes, which left committee today and are being reported back to the House: the system, when it was designed, didn't recognize that not having a limit on the number of applications that come in during a year could swamp a system that has, as any system has, a finite capacity to process those applications.
When you get more applications than you can handle each and every year and you're obliged by law to process each and every one of those applications, you're going to end up with a backlog, unless you just keep throwing more and more money at it. That's not an adequate solution. Like other modern countries in the world, we want to say that we agree to take in what we can manage and manage what we take in. That's what we're proposing to do through the legislation.
As for tackling the backlog, that's where the $109 million is going to be directed primarily, so that we can whittle it down, because by law we have to process those applications under the old rules.
And finally, we're implementing significant administrative changes, so that not only are we going to do more, but each individual—and we're going to have more individuals put on the job—will be able to do more applications each day.
So we're doing things better, smarter, faster, and more of it.