My best guess is that they did not want to risk receiving thousands of new applications they knew they could not fully process (people would not be able to do their medicals, biometrics etc. during lockdown, so they would only be able to submit a limited number of documents with their applications). IRCC would then end up with a massive backlog of applications. People would run the risk of their medicals expiring before their application has been processed etc. The fact that they stopped FSW draws as soon as the restrictions came in makes me think this might be the correct guess.I have one question, if Canada Govt send an ITA to FSW candidates then even after this it will take at least 6 months to issue a PR visa.. therefore, there should not be a problem to conduct FSW draw.. I wonder why they are not doing the same?
We've seen that they are also planning to change some of their procedures (e.g. replacing in person landing interviews with maybe an online procedure), so they are probably waiting until they have figured out how to do things better overall.