When it comes to processing capacity for permanent residents, this is not something that has me concerned about our ability to deliver. This is not something that is a major problem that we need to overcome. We're already back to the service standard for permanent residency applications for family reunification and, as of this July, we are back to the service standard for the economic class through the federal express entry system as well. This is because we put a plan in place through the immigration levels plan each year that is accompanied by the appropriate resources to make sure that we can continue to grow our processing capacity to match the number of people whom we expect to welcome as new permanent residents.
We still need to do more work to more quickly process people who are coming through temporary streams. You mentioned some of the pandemic-related challenges. To put this into perspective, there were a couple of things that happened that put extra pressure on the system. The first is that a lot of our offices shut down as a result of local public health measures all over the world. The second is that we made a decision, when the border was closed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within Canadian communities, to welcome people as permanent residents who were already here as temporary residents, including through the TR to PR program that existed during the pandemic.
We kept accepting applications at that point in time for people who couldn't travel at that point in time, and this created a couple of years' worth of applications in the system at a time when our processing capacity had been reduced. Layer on top of that the response to Afghanistan and then Ukraine, and the fact that Canada became the world's top destination for people who wanted to move somewhere else in the world, and we have a lot happening right now in our department.
However, by putting the resources into the system to hire 1,250 new people this fall—we're at about 1,100 right now—and by relaxing some of the administrative requirements on the process, including relaxed medical examinations, moving to a digital space and leveraging new technology, including advanced analytics, we have significantly grown our processing capacity. I have all the faith in the world that we're going to be back to a serviceable and reliable processing standard time next year.
You have one minute left, so I will stop my answer there and focus on what you want to talk about.