It might seem unfair that for example, an American can get PR in 3 months, but a Pakistani could wait 1-2 years for PR, but I feel this is largely due to the # of marriage fraud/refugee cases in these countries rather than staffing levels or amount of resources. Immigrating to Canada was extremely easy back when the Liberals were in power as the OP mentioned, but she has to realize that people from these high risk countries started to take advantage of our generous immigration laws. People could just simply land in Canada and divorce right away without losing their PR status. So now, our government has to tighten the rules for these countries. I wouldn't blame the government entirely, I would blame the people living in these countries who are committing marriage fraud and false refugee claims. The government doesn't just simply increase processing time for nothing, they do it because they have to respond to the increasing cases of marriage fraud, which happened because the rules were so lax back then.
Also you guys have to realize that the posted processing times is not how long it would take an average application to finish, it's the average time it takes 80% of applications to finish, so a majority of cases will complete before the posted time.
My wife's VO is Singapore, have any of you saw how quickly the processing times climbed up for that VO? I remembered it was only like 4-5 years ago, the processing time was around 8-10 months, now it's 31 months. That's probably the quickest increase in processing time I've ever seen for any VO. That really didn't dissuade us from applying, we just simply submitted the best possible application we could do, lots of documentation/proofs, spent many days preparing it. Now it looks like she's going to get her PR visa after only 7 months from the time we submitted the application. 7 months is wayyyyyyy faster than the posted 31 months.
Bottom line is everyone needs to ignore the posted times and stop worrying about how long it will take, and instead, just work hard on your application, and you will find yourself getting your COPR way faster than you realize.