100% they definitely knew this all aroundFully agree. And personally I don't believe that they simply didn't know there are inactive officers and cases which are assigned to them. This is not believable for me that these guys simply did not know that, and that no one among IRCC managers ever even once a year has not requested an internal report on cases open for more than a legitimate time. I simply don't buy that. taking into account the big scale of the matter I am 100% sure they knew about it VERY WELL. Question is why they did not do anything about it. What is the use case of this for them ? One of the tricks very popular among visa offices in many countries is that if they dont want to grant a visa or similar to someone but have no legal grounds to do that they simply make it stretch over time to wear the case out. But still the scale of this one is much bigger than that.
Sean Fraser was just looking out for his votebank, he knows if others got PRs sooner, they will vote his party out after becoming citizens in next election