You can’t compare 2016 with 2017, because in 2016 CIC had backlog of paper based applications which they cleared during 2016, that’s why draws were smaller than in 2017, they couldn’t manage both. Numbers in 2017 will be comparable in the future. I believe we will see increase in ITAs and more frequent draws right after new qouta is announced. Even with this current qouta CRS is going down and with bigger quota CRS will dip lower pretty fast. Believe and have hope, our turn is coming. Everyone’s at their own time. Have patience.
You can perfectly use the % of ITA failure (not used, cancelled or rejected) from a big enough sample (which 2016 was by all means) in order to project into 2017. That way you can calculate amount of needed ITA in order to get the desired amount of immigrants to fulfill the quota.
In fact it was you not taking into consideration the increased amount of ITA on the top of bigger EE pool. Otherwise you would see the clear indicator of an increased popularity of the EE.
There are scenarios with a different immigration amount (300k against 450k) and when projection on the economy impact was done there was no clear winner. Each of them has it weakness part.
In addition any quota increase depends strongly on the mood of Canadian citizens and their view of immigration.
Trust me, the increased amount of illegal border crossing did not really help the whole situation. (Yes, people are easily mixing up total immigration quota with the refugee immigration quota and with illegal border crossing amounts).