I want to thank my colleague for the question, and I want to take the opportunity to welcome him to his new role as my critic. I look forward to working with him, as we were doing before he took on this new assignment.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to acknowledge that this has been a very difficult time for families. There is not a single case that doesn't cross my desk or the desk of my department that doesn't really strike at us. We are motivated because of the cases and the stories of families who have been kept apart. That is why we have created pathways to allow loved ones to be reunited. In fact, since we created the travel exemptions for family members, we have processed over 55,000 cases for both immediate and extended family members.
When it came to accelerating our work with regard to spousal sponsorship, as my colleague knows, we made a commitment before the end of last year to process and prioritize approximately 50,000 spousal sponsorship applications. We made good on that promise, Madam Chair. Going forward, by adding additional resources, including the adding of 62 new full-time jobs in Sydney, Nova Scotia, we will continue to accelerate that progress so that we can get back to pre-pandemic service times.