First of all, thank you very much, Sukh, for the question.
We started preparing for this in mid-January, January 19 to be more specific. I required us to set up essential infrastructure in the area by moving biometric kits to regions, ensuring we had the personnel on hand to deal with the potential influx of people who were seeking to come to Canada.
We then introduced new measures to make it easier for people already in Canada to stay and work.
Today, we announced additional measures for Ukrainians who are seeking to flee the war and who can come to Canada. We tried to make it as simple as possible and used a model based on the existing temporary stream, which has incredible horsepower and is used to process up to two million people a year already.
We targeted a tool that was on the shelf, pared down the administrative burdens that usually lead to refusals, and tried to accelerate the process of getting people here. We've done it in a way that I think will minimize the impact on other streams, but to be clear, any time you ask an immigration system to do more, it's going to result in certain pressures on different streams. We expect, at least in the short term, that it will have some resources dedicated to Ukraine who would be the same people who would ordinarily process certain other cases, but we will be able to fill in resources on the back end, so over the long term we'll be able to play catch up.
It was the right thing to do to respond to the most important humanitarian crisis in the moment, but I think we have to continue to advance the other measures in Afghanistan, continue to settle refugees from other parts of the world, and continue to process our ordinary lines of business for economic and family unification purposes as best we can.