Citizenship and Immigration committee  The excluded family member clause is very much intended to prevent people who are not declared being sponsored at a later stage. It's to encourage full disclosure at the time of application and very much to help to prevent fraud, to protect the health, safety, and security of Canadians, and so on.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, the inventory at the end of 2016 will be the 46,000, so we have brought it down by the difference.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are two questions there, Mr. Chair. On the first one regarding the prediction, it's a little bit hard to tell, but with current levels space, we anticipate that we will continue to make significant inroads in 2017 and continue on into 2018. What we are seeing though is, as we get rid of the old cases and process those through to completion, the processing times will drop significantly in the coming years.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have already started to deal with—mostly they are from 2014, but we have also started some 2015 applications in that. In fact, there are even some from 2016. We start them all off at the same point. It's a matter of getting enough applications into progress so that we're able to finalize, but we start them in chronological order, first-come, first-served basically, but various applications can take much longer than others to proceed, so the end result is not the same, but we do start them off on a first-come, first-served basis.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before this committee as you continue this family reunification study. You will recall that the minister appeared before this committee last month at the beginning of the process. At that time, he provided you with a broad overview of our family reunification program and some of the recent developments in our policies and practices as they relate to the program.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is very much of concern to us, as well. I'll turn to Mr. Armstrong.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not aware that that has been explored. It certainly was not the intent of the super visa, the way it was set up. Certainly we're open to looking at other possibilities.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  They would be in process. Now, there are some cases that take a considerable length of time, and that's always the case, so I can't say that they've all been finalized, but they would all be in process.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Indeed, there were some changes at that time. The period of sponsorship, for instance, went from 10 years to 20. Some of the economic requirements were increased at that point. This was to ensure that the parents and grandparents would not be accessing social assistance.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm sure we could establish that. We don't have that—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, we're not aware of any regional disparity. We're certainly very conscious of ensuring fairness and transparency as we do this. As I mentioned, we are trying to look at whether there are better ways to do this. We certainly welcome ideas.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That should be available. Yes, we can supply that to the clerk.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's well understood, and we will try to provide that. I don't think I'm in a position to do that right now. We are in a phase of trying to revamp, particularly the spousal program, to find efficiencies, to find better ways to deal with it. We're trying to revamp our forms and our kits, to make them clearer and these sorts of things.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There is no doubt there have been instances where that has occurred, and too frequently. We're making every effort at the moment to try to look at the process from A to Z and to try to figure out better ways to manage that so we avoid that situation occurring.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, as of August 2016, the backlog of permanent resident applications is 12,188 cases, or 33,866 persons. While the backlog in cases has decreased since 2014, the backlog in persons has increased since July 2013, as applicants are including their dependants in their permanent resident applications.