Thank you for your nice comments on International Women's Day.
For those paper applications that are coming in, I'm happy to talk about what we have done over the past year. The pandemic hit us hard. We sent staff home, particularly in our case processing centres. This was not a labour force that was equipped to work from home. As many of you know, we operate two shifts and sometimes three shifts a day in our case processing centres, where we have computer equipment that is bolted to the wall.
Getting this workforce equipped and able to work from home has been a struggle. I'm happy to say it is working well at the moment and finding the balance among the number of people we need in the office, in our case processing centres, to make sure we can smoothly work through those paper files, get them promoted into the system and then process them.
A lot of the delays and the challenges we saw mid-2020 have been overcome. It doesn't mean it's easy, but with the work around digitization of those files with Iron Mountain and the work around critical staff in all our case processing centres.... At Sydney, Cape Breton—Sydney, Nova Scotia—because it has been in a better COVID zone than some of the rest of our case processing centres, we've really been able to keep numbers, relatively speaking, high. All of that has played into being able to promote spousal and family class files, and work them through the system.
I'm confident, going forward—and that's what we've seen already on spousal files this year—that we're moving those files through at what was the pre-pandemic pace.