To answer your first question, the primary advantage is that the applicants don't have to see us. They can proceed directly to Canada and there's less friction in their movements. Additionally, if it's a family they're not spending $400 Canadian to get the visas.
Certainly we're confident that it will increase the ease and hopefully desire of people to travel to Canada, whether for pleasure, to visit family, to attend short-term schooling--for many reasons. So in that sense it's a removal of friction.
On how this will affect processing times, it really won't. It will reduce the impact on processing times, but even this will be relatively minimal. We were approving more than 99% of temporary resident visa applications. So when a person had an application in process to immigrate, they could still go to Canada to visit loved ones. They could still get a study permit or a work permit. So the visa waiver itself won't really affect the processing times.