I think you have a very good point. The situation was unsustainable under the old act where you had the “shall” clause that said they had to process all of these applications. The way they set it up with the points, if you got a minimum score, you were accepted. So the immigration policy was on autopilot.
At that point it could have ballooned to who knows what, so something had to be done. I'm not so sure that what they did was the best way to deal with it, because I think it's good to get as many applications as possible so you can pick the best immigrants from them. I think the problem is our selection system doesn't discriminate well enough, so maybe we should have a two-stage selection system in which you let everybody apply and then you pick the ones who are most appropriate and tell the others they can't come, instead of setting up minimum qualifications and then saying that whoever meets them is in the backlog and will be admitted. I think that is just a non-starter.