Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his questions and comments, but as he is fully aware, the world has been in a global pandemic for two years. In spite of this, we landed over 405,000 immigrants last year, which is an all-time record, to help with our economic recovery.
As the Minister of Immigration announced on January 31, the government has implemented a number of measures to further improve client experience and modernize the immigration system. We have also committed an investment of $85 million to further reduce processing times and build on our progress to date. Most importantly, we will get back to our processing service standards in various programs by the end of this year.
We are taking a whole-of-government approach to address labour shortages across our country. We have taken major steps toward this by processing more than 100,000 work permit applications in the first quarter of 2022, nearly doubling the number processed over the same period in 2021.
As I mentioned—