I would say it's a question in two parts and an answer in two parts. With the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, there were no controls up until 2008 that would allow the limit of intake of applications, and there was a clear obligation within the law that every application received had to be processed to a final decision, whether positive or negative.
In the past, prior to 2002, there was different weighting provided to occupations for skilled workers that essentially allowed them to be processed or not. The process for regulating intake was much more flexible and was frequently used to ensure that backlogs didn't accumulate.
Where we did get into some problems was with the change between the previous act and the current act, where there was a court decision that essentially forced the department to assess skilled worker applicants under both the old and the new system. While this was beneficial for purposes of evaluation, it did cause a considerable draw on our resources and helped to start this notion that backlogs are part of the way we do business.