Citizenship and Immigration committee  No. Please, Mr. Chair, if I may, I would just like to correct that impression for the record. The practice notice you're referring to, which is on our website, is in direct response to the fact that the community of consultants and counsel in the eastern region came to us and explained that the time frames that are required for the submission of the basis of claim were completely impossible for them to meet because the demand for their services was so incredibly high.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I previously stated, I actually don't know how that projection was arrived at. What I can say is that the way in which we project our future backlog or workload issues is around scenario building. We essentially project the number of claims and we divide it by, say, 24,000 claims that we can finalize per year, and that will give you the wait time for how long it will take—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have no idea where that figure comes from in terms of dollars. Do you know where that came from, because it must have been based on calculus that was done somewhere other than the IRB?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For the IRB backlog, we're doing several things. One is that we have a plan of action in place, which is intended to really maximize our ability to deal with the backlog in the most efficient way possible, including—and Mike referred to advances in technology—the way in which we could leverage technology to support our members.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The fact is that we have a finite number of claims we can handle a year. We can handle about 24,000 a year. The point is that there's only added cost if you add more resources to be able to handle more claims than that. The cost for an RPD claim is about $2,600 per claim, and that's without an appeal.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is actually 5,300 cases. Sorry, I think I said over 5,000. But the reallocation was made. As I mentioned earlier, it turns out there are 26 vacancies. Essentially what we reallocated was the funding for salary dollars that would have been allocated had those positions all been filled, so it didn't actually impact our operations.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Oh, that was 1,000. Now we're at about 1,400 per month. I'm not sure what date you're asking me about regarding new funding—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There has been no new funding from a year ago.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's 1,400.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Internal efficiencies will actually help somewhat. We are looking, as I said, at different triage methods for the way we can schedule better and more effectively. We are looking at digital tools for supporting our members. We are looking at various efficiencies. We don't know how much that will add.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I really can't project, but it is a significant gap. We are, as I mentioned earlier, focusing on what kinds of resources we would need in order to close that gap, with various scenarios.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We are in frequent communication with our partners in the department, and yes, we're all in this together.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Would you like to take that?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We could, absolutely.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  First of all, that 11 years was actually not put out by our department. That's not a calculus based on our numbers. It was based on IRCC departmental numbers. I am not sure how that 11 years was calculated, but it is a question of calculus, if you look at increases of.... I think that one assumed a certain fixed rate of increase, and they just did the mathematical calculation with the number of members that we have.