Certainly.
Chair, probably the biggest single factor for us as a department on the permanent immigration side is that, by and large, we do not control intake in terms of the number of applications to our programs, whereas on the output side, our annual levels plan determines how many people we will actually admit.
With an open-ended application system, it means we may get wide variations in demand for different parts of our program. That may far exceed the number of applicants we are able to allow to come into the country in any given year. That's probably the single biggest factor.
However, there are others. There are issues in different parts of the world dealing with security clearances, for example, where that may be a very significant issue. Those cases go to the RCMP and to CSIS. Depending on their complexity, they may take quite some time to be reviewed before they would come back to us for further processing. We also deal with health issues. All immigrants require an immigrant medical exam, to be cleared medically before they can come here. Again, in different parts of the world that may take quite some time to actually be available.
Fourth, and this was referred to earlier, it is going to depend on the individuals and how quickly they respond. We may issue instructions to a client to go and get a medical. The client might not do it at all, or they may take six months to do it. We don't know. We might remind them after a period of time, and we might close their file after a period of time if they haven't followed up.
So all of those are the kinds of factors that affect how quickly we deal with processing.