Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much for being here this morning. My constituency office does quite a bit of immigration work. It doesn't compare, perhaps, with a downtown Toronto or downtown Vancouver riding, but I think it does as much as or perhaps more than any other constituency office in Atlantic Canada just because of the diversity of the riding of Halifax West. One thing that my assistant who does most of this work for me says is that she's seen a slowing in the number of applications under the Atlantic immigration pilot and the express entry program over the past year or so. The process seems to have slowed down. It seems to her, at least, that the six-month targets are often not being met, and sometimes they're as much as 18 months.
Can you tell me about what's happening there? What would cause that kind of fluctuation?