Thank you.
What I was saying was that, if you look at Public Safety Canada's website, it declares what's essential. For the pandemic, we were looking at what areas are critical infrastructure for Canada. One of them is government. Within that government heading are listed “Workers supporting...permanent residency...visas”.
The Canadian visa officers and immigration officers throughout Canada should have been declared essential. They should have been made to go back to work, with proper protocols, masking, etc., so that this backlog was not allowed to be created. It affects our ability to respond to humanitarian crises. It affects our ability to reunite families. It affects Canada's competitiveness in terms of our economy.
It's a huge impact across the whole country, and this should never have been allowed to develop.