It might help to have some hard data to look at then just speculation about what Buffalo and Ottawa are doing.
First off in US visa offices, what's the current number of FSW cases pending? Well, there are about 773 MI-3 cases (Jun/2011 - Jun/2012) pending, where virtually all are pending selection decision and none have been previously finalized. In other words, US visa offices haven't even started processing these cases yet. There are 1649 MI-2 cases (Jun/2010 - Jun/2011) still pending as of April this year with vast majority pending selection decision. Previous to this, they finalized 122 MI-2 cases averaging about 14 months processing time on each case. So in essence, they are beginning to get into serious processing of MI-2 cases this year. And finally there are 4913 MI-1 cases (Feb/2008 - Jun/2010) still pending with 2/3's pending final decision. These cases are hopefully wrapping up quickly now but MI-1 are still the most significant number of pending cases. All in all, 7415 FSW cases pending in US visa offices where 4913 were specifically at the Buffalo as of April this year.
To get perspective on how long for these applications to be processed. From Apr 2011 to Mar 2012, Buffalo processed 4037 cases. So one would imagine that the vast majority of those pending cases at Buffalo could have been finalized in the coming year had Buffalo stayed open. But given it has closed, we need to look at CPP-Ottawa's throughput...
I would imagine the majority of the 4913 FSW cases at Buffalo went to CPP-Ottawa. CPP-Ottawa had 379 cases still pending in April this year, so Ottawa now has a max backlog of about 5300 FSW cases. However, Ottawa previously only did QSW and some pre-2008 FSW cases. So we don't have very good numbers to compare how many post-2008 FSW cases they can process in a year. But for those other SW cases, they processed 1384 in the last year. That means, if the Ottawa office doesn't increase staff and processes the similar number of cases, we would expect up to three years for these cases to be finalized. My searches for job ads with the government in Ottawa did not return anything. And we know the conservative government is trying to cut the CIC budget, so for now I assume there is no effort for large-scale increase of staff at Ottawa.
I believe two-three years wait for us recent MI-3 applicants is the worse case scenario, and I still hope that there are staff increases going on at Ottawa so they can process these newly transferred cases efficiently. But I would advise others to not bet too much on a quick or sudden surge of processing.
BTW, data comes from:
http://www.data.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=5175A6F0-1&xsl=datacataloguerecord&metaxsl=datacataloguerecord&formid=B6F7C54E-EF4B-4EC1-8DDE-7315E97D18EB
http://www.data.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=5175A6F0-1&xsl=datacataloguerecord&metaxsl=datacataloguerecord&formid=427337D0-7C36-4FED-8428-C6A63F8C19B3
Of course by residing in US without status is whole another story, it's all up to you...
