I agree with you that the wait times and the backlogs in both those programs were unacceptable. They kept families apart and ensured that loved ones were unnecessarily kept apart. We made it a priority to tackle the spousal sponsorship system initially by promising two things: that we would make a lot of progress on the backlog and that 80% of the applications would be able to be processed in 12 months or less.
I'm proud to update this committee, as I updated all Canadians yesterday, that we have done both. We have reduced the backlog in the spousal program from 75,000 cases to 15,000, and we have achieved the processing time target of 12 months or less for more than 80% of the cases.
When we looked at the applications from December 2016 and examined those applications on December 31, 2017, we saw that over 80% of them were processed in under 12 months.