Well the important question is: How many employees does Ankara have in their visa section right now?
In 2011 they had 2 Canadian Base and 8 local staff in total of 10 people working at their visa section. They were all responsible for immigration matters, such as skill worker, business immigration, family, spousal & refugee applications, plus student and visitor visas & all other Canadian citizen's passport applications, new born registations, lost PR's and Passports, etc.
Before 2 people were processing family and spousal sponsorship applications. I don't know how many extra staff came from Damascus? Because 2 people basically can't process 1400 spousal and family files in a year. Nowadays students and visitors are applying their visas via VFS Global. Therefore temp. visas section are more relaxed and don't spend any time for correspondence.
If they want to melt the backlog these temp section officers should help other permanent immigration apps including family and spousal files. However, according to CIC waiting times they're OK with 15-16 months as an average time of spousal files, and I don't think that they care about working more faster.!