Thanks very much.
Mr. McCallum's remarks unfortunately demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge of the changes we've made to the immigration system. Processing times under our economic programs have not gone up. On the contrary, we introduced something called express entry, which has the fastest processing times ever for Canadian immigration, at six months or less.
I mentioned to you a candidate who had been processed in two weeks. This was never possible in the Liberals' time. It was not possible until now even under our government, because it took us some years to put this new system into place.
On citizenship we did have a backlog, and a growing backlog, because of strong immigration and because of a cumbersome system of approvals for citizenship—the three-step process and not enough resources. The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, which passed last year, has had a huge impact. There were 260,000 new citizens last year, and close to that pace again this year. Processing times are plunging faster than we even expected in this area.
Yes, we do need to keep attacking backlogs in the family area—this is part of the Liberal legacy we inherited—and we will continue to do that. We've made progress on parents and grandparents under the action plan for faster family reunification. We will make more progress on spouses.
I'm not hiding the fact that processing times for spouses have gone up slightly, but we've demonstrated our ability to bring backlogs under control. For Mr. McCallum to say that we have larger backlogs and longer waiting times for the federal skilled worker program is absurd. We have reduced the backlog for that program, which had become essentially stuck under the Liberal government with a huge backlog and multiple-year waiting times for people who arrived in Canada under the Liberals without the ability to go to work in their chosen fields. That backlog has been reduced by 97%.