OTTAWA — The Harper government says it has reduced Canada’s immigration backlog by 40 per cent.
Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says the total wait list at the end of 2012 was down to 616,271 from more than a million the year before.
He says there would have been more than two million people stuck in the queue by 2015 had the government not taken measures to deal with the problem.
Those measures include a temporary moratorium on applications from immigrant investors, as well as parents and grandparents of immigrants.
Kenney dismissed suggestions that simply accepting more immigrants would reduce the backlog.
He says doing so would still leave more than a million people in the queue by 2015.