I would buy that as the cause if the delay was experienced all over Canada. So the answer to your question is NO, that flood of applications is not enough to explain the delay.While I respect your right to vent, I've got to ask... you don't think that it's reason enough that the law changed and it caused something close to a year worth of applications to be filed in a single month?
In Canada, everything has a long processing time, and maybe that's why Canadians have a long life expectancy (Evolutionary requirement), for having to wait for everything to be processed in a very bureaucratic way!!