Citizenship and Immigration committee  Certainly. As the deputy indicated, we're very pleased with the numbers that have shown interest around the world. We had four rounds of invitations—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  —and 3,594 individuals have been invited to apply under this program since its inception in January. They come under a variety of categories. They come under the federal skilled worker program, the federal skilled trades program, the Canadian experience class, and a portion of the provincial nominee program.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The number of individuals applying inland for spousal applications has almost doubled since 2010, and this is part of the issue we're trying to deal with. Under the CIC's levels plan, we give about 48,000 spaces for spouses, partners, and children. The majority of that is from overseas, because we do try to bring people from overseas first.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, it may be a little premature to really comment on the impact of some of the specific changes. What I can comment on, though, is the processing, and there have been significant advances there. As you will recall, there was $44 million given to the department over two years under the economic action plan of 2013, to look at processing times for routine cases and try to get them to below one year by the end of fiscal year 2015-16.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Mr. Chair, the issue of spousal processing is one that's very important to us, and that's why there is considerable space in the levels program to deal with these applications. About 48,000 people will be admitted through that category this year. We're doing our utmost to try to reduce the processing times and to be very clear on what is required in this process.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Set out in the levels plan there are provisions for all the various categories, who we will be looking at, and the numbers we'll be dealing with in each category. So yes, it's very much taken into consideration within the 2015 levels plan what the numbers will be, and that was tabled in Parliament at the end of October.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, they'll be processed on a parallel track. It's not that one is going to be displacing the other or trumping another—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We're well on track in reducing the backlogs. A good chunk of that will be done during the course of 2015. The vast majority of any backlogs in the federal skilled worker program will be sorted out during 2015. It will not be entirely complete, though, I don't think, during that time.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  To add to that, I think the impact is going to be very significant in bringing down processing to under a year, estimated by 2015–16, with the new decision-maker model. With the new money, if we kept the current system, we would be down to only 14 months by 2017–18. I think that's on the chart that was distributed.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The number, I believe, is 85 where there's been revocation as a result of residency fraud. Residency fraud can take a variety of different fashions, but essentially it is people who are claiming to be in the country when in fact they are abroad. At the moment, without exit controls, we have no objective way of identifying this.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, we can follow up with specifics on that. It becomes a somewhat complicated story, but yes, we can deal with that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  On how long they've actually been waiting, no, I don't. There are about—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Perhaps I can talk first of all about the residency questionnaire. There was a great increase in the number of residency questionnaires that were sent out 18 months ago or so. We have tried to reduce that significantly. We've gone through a real blitz to try to reduce the number of residency questionnaires and have moved about 71% of those who had residency questionnaires into straight processing and on to testing.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's correct, which we covered through lapses.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For the year 2013-14, Mr. Chair, the department was able to cover a lot of the ramping up in the citizenship program through lapses in other areas of the department. This year, in 2014-15, I believe $28 million will be spent to improve processing time in the citizenship program.