When I had gone for my finger printing for FBI clearance, the front desk agent joked they introduced the online verification portal last year precisely because they were so many applications coming in all of a sudden ! I thought she was joking but now come to think of it maybe not !They wouldn't care about keeping the score high. Why would they? All they would care about is allowing only the top layer of the people who applied. The interest to apply to canada has simply increased recently. It's just a cascading effect. This can be seen from the overall pool size which ballooned recently. Went from 100k to 130k now.
I myself have seen increased applications from the people who have Masters in the US(I'm in the US). When I went to get my police verification done for my stay in the US, the police officer asked me why there were so many people coming to him for the verification recently.
There is a marked increase in the interest to apply to Canada from the people in the US because of the increasing uncertainty of H1B and because you can get a PR without any strings attached in Canada. People are using Canada as a backup/safer choice to the US.