The backwardness of immigration to Canada has increased to 2.4 million people, with more than 250,000 applications added to the stack over a one-month period.
This is according to recent data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) in all categories, from temporary residence and permanent residence to citizenship applications.
“I haven’t seen delays like this in 16 years of my career as an immigration lawyer,” Rick Lamanna, director of Fragomen Canada, an immigration service provider, told CTV News in a telephone interview on Thursday.
“Before the pandemic, things were going pretty well.”
The increase in backlog has already created frustration for those waiting to receive an update to the IRCC application.
Recent data only raises more questions that do not answer applicants in limbo.
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Despite being among the top five destinations with immigrant-friendly policies around the world, Canada is seeing an upward trend in pandemic delays.
Long processing times and lack of communication and transparency are some of the many issues highlighted by families who contacted CTVNews.ca.
“EXTREMELY STRESSING”
Lamanna said changes in processing times prevent families and even businesses from planning anything in advance.
“If you had to log in right now and take a look at the processing time outside of India, it will take about a year,” he said.
Part of the problem he pointed out is that the IRCC faced a cascading effect from the fall of Afghanistan and then the pandemic.
During COVID-19, IRCC staff were not considered “essential workers,” so delays only began to grow. Now, with the war in Ukraine, there is a massive backlog, he adds. Between March 17 and June 8, 2022, 296,163 applications were received under the program.
For most, long delays have delayed their vital decisions while they continue to wait for another country.
Kazim Ali applied for permanent residency through the Express Entry Program in 2020 from Pakistan and has been waiting to receive an update ever since. He said he had no idea how long he would have to wait until he began his new life in Canada with his wife.
“Our lives have been halted due to a lack of communication and a clear timetable for processing delays,” Ali said in an interview with CTVNews.ca from Pakistan during a zoom call on Wednesday.
Ali said the estimated processing time was six months at the time of filing.
Despite repeated emails, it looks like Ali’s app has stopped. He said the IRCC helpline is of no use to those outside of Canada.
He was told to contact the visa office that is processing his application. It is currently in the London, UK office, with no updates.
Ali has stopped his long-term plans, including his career, buying a home and family planning.
He said the wait is now affecting their mental and emotional health and has been “extremely stressful” for the couple.
“IRCC really needs a reality check and needs to understand that it is not only processing a lot of documents, but making decisions that affect the lives of families and future generations,” Ali said.
In a statement sent to CTVNews.ca, IRCC Communications Officer Jeffrey MacDonald said that application inventories grew during the pandemic while health and travel restrictions were in place, and that it will take a time to fully recover.
McDonald said IRCC is moving toward a more integrated, modernized, and centralized work environment to help accelerate the processing of applications globally.
‘COVID IS NO LONGER AN EXCUSE’
But Mustakima Gazi, who works as an assistant to long-term care pandemic residents, said COVID-19 can no longer be an excuse.
Gazi, a Canadian from London, Ont., Has been waiting for her husband’s spouse application since December 2021 and has seen progress since she last spoke to CTVNews.ca in May.
But even though the application reaches the next stage, it remains discouraged.
The couple is part of a Facebook community that includes families waiting for IRCC updates. He said some who had applied for a medical examination (a requirement for those applying for permanent residence) last year were still waiting to receive an IRCC update.
Gazi’s husband lives alone in the Netherlands and with his limbo application, he is under immense mental stress.
To make matters worse, he said, it is the processing times on the online portal that keep changing.
He said that one might think that the processing time would decrease as the applications are processed.
“But that’s not the case,” he said. “At one point, the estimated time was 12 months, and the following week was 23 months.”
Gazi has tried to call IRCC many times to get more information about our app, hoping to speed things up, but has never been able to contact anyone who could answer the status quo.
“Sometimes the helpline disconnects without even putting me on a waiting line,” he said.
The only time he logged in, the IRCC agent tried to help, but was unable to provide any updates as the request was being processed outside of Canada.
“Everyone is fighting in a battle and doing everything we can to overcome these difficult times. We want to be close to our families who can support us,” he said.
‘ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION’
Among those frustrated by the lack of communication and transparency is Anne Marie Trad, a Canadian citizen who has been hoping to be with her husband, Pierre Ajaltouni, since 2019.
The couple married in 2018 in Beirut, Lebanon and Trad applied for a spouse visa from there in 2019.
More than 50 months have passed since then.
Trad has tried all the routes to get updates: he contacted the MP’s office, contacted his local MP, filled out web forms and called the IRCC helpline . But nothing has helped.
Her husband’s application for a spouse was filed outside of Canada (Beirut), so navigating the status of the application is more complicated than those being processed in Canada.
Trad said the state says “doing a background check” since 2019.
Hoping for a faster route, he applied for a visit visa from Canada in 2020. But even that has had no impetus.
Trad last visited her husband in August 2021 and is now concerned that with the current crisis in Lebanon, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make such visits.
The three-year wait has affected the couple’s mental health, causing anxiety and depression. Trad said her husband has lost a lot of weight and is worried about her health.
The couple took legal action last year to get immigration officials to act on the files affected by the delays: a warrant warrant.
The legal route is definitely not cheap, Trad said, but he sees no better option to speed up the process.
“We just want to get our lives back on track after three years of waiting,” he said.
WHAT DOES IRCC DO?
To support the prosecution and settlement of new permanent residents in Canada, the government has committed $ 2.1 billion over five years and $ 317.6 million ongoing in new funding announced in the 2022 budget.
With additional funding of $ 85 million from the 2021 Economic and Fiscal Update, IRCC seeks to reduce inventory inventories accumulated during the pandemic by hiring new processing staff, digitizing applications, and implementing technology-based solutions such as digital input and advanced analytics.
Lamanna said hiring will help reduce delays, but that will take some time.
“Even if IRCC hires more people, it could be months before any new hires group is really effective in tackling the backdrop, as that would require new training,” he said.
He said digitization is a step in the right direction, but that even this could happen years before it is finally implemented and may not help those currently waiting and may help new applicants in 2023.
“It’s a very difficult situation,” he said.
HOW DID SO MUCH PAIN GO?
Many immigration law firms have seen an increase in mandamus applications. In more than 10 months, the Toronto-based law firm Abramovich & Tchern has prosecuted more than 200 mandamus cases.
It is unfortunate that applicants have to take this route, Abramovich & Tchern immigration lawyer Lev Abramovich told CTVNews.ca on Thursday.
Abramovich, who does not represent any of the applicants in this story, said that it was not COVID-19 itself that created the backlog, but ultimately revealed the “archaic structure and poor management style. agile.
“After the impact of the pandemic, the processing centers were operating with very limited capacity, and this contributed in part to the increase in arrears.
Some categories of applications submitted during the pandemic were on paper and were in the offices, accumulating dust for many months.
Abramovich said most of the mandamus applications his company has received come from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, India and China.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Lamanna said one of the solutions is to prioritize groups or processes and fix them instead of trying to have a global approach. “So people understand how to process those requests,” he said.
Abramovich said the existing system should be “centralized and agile.”
Many times, an application is stuck in an office outside of Canada that may be partially functional for a variety of reasons, such as shutdown or remote work orders.
He said a centralized agile system would manage applications by redistributing them to different offices.
“And they will be processed, more or less depending on the moment they entered, not depending on the …