I am going to have to contradict the figures on our website.
Those figures concern the most complex applications we have received in years, and they require additional documentation on residency. There were thousands of cases involving residency, and the possibility that people who claimed to have resided in Canada for three years had not really done so.
If we set aside these complex cases, we see that there has been considerable improvement in processing times for citizenship applications. More than a quarter million applications were processed last year. This year, the processing rate and the progress in this area is very rapid. A new citizenship application submitted this year—as of now, for instance—will be processed in a time period that goes far beyond our expectations and is closer to a one-year processing time.
When we went forward with Bill C-24, we promised that the processing time for new applications would be 12 months or less as of the beginning of 2016. We are already getting close to that objective.