Thank you.
As I've said to this committee before, the single biggest challenge that our ministry faces is managing what we call the various inventories, the backlogs. When our government came to office in 2006, the overall immigration backlog was pushing up to one million cases.
Let me say first of all that in the main stream of economic immigration--the federal skilled worker program--we've made enormous progress. The backlog had peaked at 640,000 cases, I believe. Had we not taken action through the action plan for faster immigration involving the ministerial instructions and related operational changes, we would have seen that backlog for federal skilled workers grow to over 800,000 cases by now. On processing times, the five-plus years edging up to over six-plus years was unacceptable. The system was on the brink of collapsing under its own weight. Something had to be done and was done through amendments to IRPA and operational changes, in addition to a $109-million incremental investment in budget 2008.
Thanks to those measures we have seen the backlog in the federal skilled worker program processing reduced by 32%, which is the latest figure I have. People who are making applications--as of February 2008--are now getting answers within a year. I have to say that when I speak to immigration practitioners, lawyers, and people who follow this closely, they are delighted with the program and how it's working.
The Auditor General has pointed to certain challenges, and we take her comments very seriously. She appeared to make her comments or projections based on the assumption that we will maintain the 38 categories indefinitely into the future. In point of fact, we've always indicated that we will adjust the ministerial instructions for the occupational categories as necessary. If that means we'll need to refine the categories following consultation with the provinces and other stakeholders, we will certainly do so. In fact it's our intention to refine the ministerial instructions. That will help us maintain the progress we've made on backlog reduction for the skilled worker category.