Those were my thoughts exactly. It would be hard for CIC to reach their goals if they don't reduce the minimum scores for the ITAs, unless they are planning to mass invite in the last quarter of the year and increase the processing time (maybe even longer than their goal of 6 months) instead of reducing the minimum score for invitations.
One mistake most of us (including me) are doing here is that assuming that CIC will keep a steady number of invitations coming throughout the year, but in reality they can just reduce the number of ITAs issued for a while or do more stream specific (e.g. CEC only) draws until the number of people on the pool will get to a point where the top 20000 people (assuming that's the number at that point they will need to reach their goal) will be at a minimum of, say 300 points. This way they ensure that all the ITAs they issue will have gone to highly skilled people or people who already adjusted to Canadian life (CEC).
From what I understand his reasoning was similar to my description above; they will keep inviting people over 450 to get the people with the highest skills ("geniuses" in his words), the people the market needs currently (LMIA & PNP), and the people who already adjusted to Canadian life (CEC) until they get close to the end of the year. I guess then he is expecting CIC to start inviting many thousands of Vanilla-FSW applicants (No LMIA, No CEC, No PNP) per draw to reach their goals.
So again I believe he thinks that the number of ITAs issued won't be as high as they were in the previous draws in the Q2 and Q3 draws, but would be very high in Q4 draws. Or CIC will have CEC only draws pretty often (depending on the number of people on that stream)
This kind of makes sense to me especially since Canada would want to get the best of the best among the applicants and would want to keep the minimum score to be invited for PR at a maximum. At the last quarter of the year, the number of people between 300 and 600 would be very high, and a significant portion of the FSW goal would have been filled with LMIA holders already, increasing the minimum CRS needed for invitation. This would allow them to select only applicants scoring very high on the scale and not invite people below 300.
Naturally I'm making these numbers up but to provide a better context, what's important is that you understand my reasoning.
He even said he doesn't want me to pay him before I get an ITA because he wouldn't want to "steal my money". It was pretty discouraging. This is a very well known lawyer in Toronto too so I think he knows what he's talking about...