Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the chance to address the question from the hon. member. Let me say, to begin, that as the newly appointed parliamentary secretary for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, I very much look forward to working with the hon. member in the coming weeks and months.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenging time for everyone. To protect the health and safety of Canadians, Canada has had to take necessary measures that have had an effect on immigration. However, in terms of restoring operations and increasing application processing capacity, we have made significant gains since last spring. In fact, IRCC has introduced measures to support the processing of permanent resident applications, including spouse or common-law partner sponsorship applications, and is providing applicants additional time to provide documents. Family reunification continues to be a priority for this government. It is key to Canada's future, and we know that, especially as we work to recover from COVID-19. It is important for families to be together in this difficult time, and we are reuniting families by allocating additional resources, streamlining our processes and moving paper applications to digital.
Last year, we introduced a pilot project aimed at digitizing spousal applications. This will allow officers in Canada and abroad to remotely process spousal applications faster and more efficiently. Just last month, we expanded our case processing centre in Sydney and added 62 new staff, who will be primarily assigned to family class applications.
In September, to speed up processing and reduce the wait for couples to reunite in Canada, we increased the number of decision-makers on spousal applications by 66%—