The federal skilled worker backlog peaked at about 640,000 cases. As has been noted, the new ministerial instructions authority allowed us to use a number of measures to reduce application intake so we could focus on the applications we already had. The first thing we did there was to use an occupational screen. Applications had to meet what we called in-demand occupations. That was the first set of ministerial instructions. We refer to those as ministerial instructions one.
In subsequent ministerial instructions, we have subsequently basically imposed a cap within those occupational streams in terms of the number of applications we will accept in total, and the ones within each stream. It became clear that we were still receiving a lot more applications than we could deal with. That was the second type of approach that we have used.
Then, the third approach we have taken—you have seen this in the parents and grandparents program—is a pause on new applications while we focus just on those applications in the backlog. That's how we have used ministerial instructions on federal skilled workers. We did make very good progress in the first two to three years. We went from 640,000 and I think now we're at about 300,000 remaining in that group.