Whoever gave you their advice about how to clear up the backlog I think was close to the mark.
If you want to clear up the backlog...let me go way back. In the 1950s, if you were an immigrant here, you could bring your brother, your sister, your aunt, your uncle, your nephew, your niece, your parents, and also your spouse, if you desired to do it. Immediately, in parts of Europe, particularly in Italy, there was a massive backlog of thousands of uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters.
In order to get rid of the backlog, the minister at the time had to make a tough decision and decided that she would cut out the ability to sponsor uncles, aunts, nieces, and even brothers and sisters. They could no longer be sponsored. Then we sent extra officers to Rome to try to process and get rid of the backlog, which we eventually did. The minister paid the price for this in the next election. She was defeated in a constituency that had a large Italian population.
But that's the problem. If you wanted to clear up the backlog, you would not allow new applicants; you'd cut it off. Then you would send a task force around to the various offices to process the relatives and get them in quickly.
That would cost money, and it would cost a minimum amount of money compared with what it would cost once they got here, because then they would become eligible for free health care. They would become eligible after a certain period of time for the age supplement and the old age security and other benefits, which they wouldn't have paid for, nor would the sponsors have paid for those. You would run the risk of doing that.
In addition to that, if you were going to concentrate on the family class, it would mean that the highly skilled, educated, and experienced people whom we're looking for in the economic class would have to be cut back.
It could be done and it could be done fairly quickly, but it would be very risky to do it politically, I'd say.