I think the biggest factor, the starting point, really, is how many people Canada wants to admit every year, and then you work backwards from there. How many applications would we need to take in order to provide a reasonable response time to people? Right now, by and large, our application system is completely open-ended, so we accept applications continuously.
I think if we want to respond to people in a timely way, for us we would say that typically a six- to twelve month period would be reasonable, given security clearances, health and medicals, and things that need to be done. Grosso modo, we think that would be reasonable. Then we would need to restrict the number of applications we accept in any one year. In fact, we've just done that for the federal skilled worker program. We've set a cap of 20,000 applications that we will accept. This puts us much more in the realm of the number of applications we can review and process in a one-year period.
But that, from my perspective, is the key.