Even prior to the investments as part of budget 2018, the Immigration and Refugee Board had embarked on certain measures to ensure that they had improved their ability to finalize cases, and there was an increase in their productivity levels with respect to their finalization of cases. In addition to that, budget 2018 recognizes the importance of investing in the IRB additional resources to enable them to finalize cases faster. Budget 2018, therefore, pledges an amount of $74 million for the Immigration and Refugee Board to be able to do that.
In addition to that, the IRB has stated that they will institute a new scheduling system that would allow them to proportionally dedicate resources based on the proportional number of asylum claimants who are making asylum claims through the IRB who have crossed the border irregularly. For example, in the eastern region, 60% of the caseload is now people claiming asylum who had crossed the border irregularly. Based on that, they will then dedicate more than half of their resources to process those folks very quickly.