Thank you.
As I mentioned in my opening statement, Mr. Chairman, we have had considerable success with respect to the action plan for faster immigration in the federal skilled worker category, more commonly known as the points system. Since we made the action plan operational last November, about 10 months ago, we have seen the backlog in the federal skilled worker category go from 635,000 cases to 435,000 cases. That's a reduction of about 32%.
That's actually a phenomenal achievement, and I'd like to give praise where it belongs: to our departmental officials, who have worked very hard over the past year to manage this new program while also dealing with the applications that were received prior to February of 2008, which don't fall within the action plan. They've also been continuing to process a large number of those files.
So we've seen a one-third reduction in the federal skilled worker category. While we have seen improvements in processing times for family class sponsorship applications—for instance, processing times have gone down considerably in the last three years in that regard—we have not seen a reduction in the inventory in that category. Also, as you know, in the refugee asylum category we've seen a substantial increase, and we're now dealing with 60,000 asylum claims.
It depends on the category, but overall, the mainstream economic stream of immigration to Canada, the federal skilled worker program, has seen a massive improvement. We expect to continue to see that.
One other point is that people who applied under that program since February of last year are getting decisions on their application for permanent residency in less than a year, which is a radical improvement over the four to five years it was taking prior to the action plan.