Thanks for the question.
To take one very concrete example, which comes up a lot in our constituency work across the country, in the case of Chandigarh, backlogs are still an issue there, but the approval rate was also an issue. Until we reformed the regulation of consultants and strengthened our partnership with India to make sure integrity was on the agenda from both sides, we had a very low approval rate—34% in 2004. I'm proud to report that in 2012 it was 53% and it continues to rise. There has been a 19% increase.
On backlogs, in 2006 we inherited a backlog across the board, across all programs, of 843,434 applications, the better part of a million. It went up and peaked at a million before we had fully implemented the measures we now have in place, and since that peak it has steadily declined to the point where in 2013 we are at 475,000 with continued declines projected for next year and the year after. If no action had been taken, if we had remained on the same path, we would certainly be in the neighbourhood of 1.7 million in the backlog now, moving to two million and above next year.
Above and beyond that, Mr. Menegakis, as you know, we would be continuing to break faith with applicants, because we would be accepting applications that realistically we had no capacity to process. So the date when they would be processed would be ever further ahead. We've all read novels from great artists with famous names like Kafka and Orwell in which these kinds of things happened. They should never have happened in Canada, and we are proud to have made progress in ensuring they never happen again.