First, congratulations. You were lucky. My wife took 18 or 19 months to come through the spousal sponsorship program, and that was in 2009-10, so yes, the number has gone up slightly, but why is that the case? There are three reasons.
Demand has outstripped our capacity to process. We project every year how many spouses, how many dependent children, how many parents and grandparents we expect to have coming into our programs. Sometimes the number of applications exceeds. That is what has contributed to this growing backlog, and we will attack it and we will bring it down. I think the reasonable time for the processing of spousal sponsorship cases should be much lower. We've shown across the board our ability to reduce backlogs. We will do it in this area as well.
What are the alternatives? To reduce other backlogs, we have eliminated them by legislation, or we have ranked and sorted them on the basis of merit. Obviously in the case of spouses, we're not going to do that.
Every application is important. Every application will be processed, but we need to find the resources to do it on the scale where it is required now. We are getting these applications because of the strength of our economic immigration program. Because of the strength of Canada's economy, people want to come here, and they want to come here with their spouses.
We also need to attack some of the vulnerabilities in the spousal program. There is an issue of marriage of convenience. There is an issue of forced marriage, which we're dealing with, we hope, through Bill S-7. There is an issue of fraud and misrepresentation in the spousal program.
As we have tightened up the integrity of other programs, we have seen some people—