For which kinds of applications? Visitors, immigrants...? Let me give you an example and then you tell me if there are other areas that are of interest.
With respect to the federal skilled workers program, there are hundreds of thousands in the backlog and a peak wait time of seven or eight years. Imagine an engineer who applied in 1995, 1994, 1999 to work in aerospace engineering, advanced manufacturing, or the oil sands, only to be told that his or her application would be processed in seven or eight years. The engineer won't be accepted necessarily, just processed. How do you plan your career in that case? How do you know what the Canadian economy will look like in seven or eight years? How do you know what to do in the interim?
No one plans his life like that, and we were wrong to expect that we would get the economic immigrants we needed with such a long backlog.
Today, following the measures your committee has helped us take, the waiting time is one year. The points system has been changed. The assessments of our labour market are improving, and the match between federal skilled workers and the real needs of employers is tighter than ever.
Under expression of interest, it's going to go from one year down to six months. We hope it will go below that, but let's start with six months. That will be a major improvement and also put us in a very competitive frame.
With regard to parents and grandparents, there has been some controversy. When we came into office, it was 64 months or more. Then, because the policy was in place, more applications were coming, not enough were being processed, and the wait time went up. We are proud to say that now the backlog for parents and grandparents is smaller than it was when we came into office. It was 108,000, and now it's something like 90,000, or will be by the end of this year. The wait time is 64 months or less, and last year, 2012, this year, 2013, and next year, 2014, we will have admitted a record number of parents and grandparents, while managing the intake of new applications so that we're not taking them under false pretenses. We are also positioning ourselves to re-open to a limited number of new applications in 2014.
In addition, while trying to restore trust with families who want their parents and grandparents here and who have a right to expect reasonable processing times, we've innovated. Not every parent and grandparent wants to come as an immigrant. We put in place the super visa, which has proven to be more popular than anyone anticipated. More than a thousand are being issued per month, not just in India, but around the world. We have multiple-entry visas, secure access for weddings, visas to help with child care. These serve all kinds of purposes, without putting an enormous additional cost on the Canadian health care system, because the families themselves assume the cost of health insurance.