Sean Fraser talked at length about the various measures the IRCC is currently taking to reduce the application backlog for Canadian immigration, labor shortage, and the efforts to enhance customer experience.
IRCC declared its plan to recruit at least 1,250 employees to better the processing system and lessen the existing backlog. It aims to put in more effort to improve the system’s efficiency. IRCC claims that the new recruitments will lead to reduced waiting times and proper handling of the fresh applications as per the standard of pre-pandemic levels. The processing time must also be equivalent to the Express Entry program’s standard processing times.
January to July 2022- processing data
IRCC’s target plan for 2022 remained as much as 431,000 new permanent residents while in 2021, the department welcomed a figure of 405,000 to Canada. The targets are based on the decisions of the Immigration Levels Plan. The months from January to July received 275,000 new permanent residents in Canada in 2022. The exact period also witnessed over 220,000 open work permits. These open work permits will let the employees work in any location in Canada for almost all occupations. The study permit applications also significantly increased, with over 360,000 completed permits in 2022.
There is a 31 % increase in the study permit applications compared to the applications during the exact period in 2021.
IRCC to address backlog issue with monthly data publishing
IRCC stated that the processing delays have extended further because Canada was involved in solving the humanitarian crisis and producing new aging technology measures to match current requirement standards. As per official reports, almost 54 percent of applications took longer processing times in all business fields. IRCC claimed that its primary objective is to process a minimum of 80 percent of fresh applications as per the given standard times.
IRCC considered the application backlog and decided to publish the processing data month-wise on the website. The department is ready to take additional measures to bring more improvements to the Canadian immigration system. It will talk about the details of the new measures in a few months.
Immigration backlog- a summary
IRCC’s application backlog reached its peak during the pandemic crisis. The backlog accounted for 2.7 million applications during July. The exact figure provided for the reduced backlog is 2.4 million applicants as acknowledged on July 31.
IRCC has also revealed the definition of backlog application. It didn’t count applications processed in due time of the standard services as backlog applications. The applications that are unable to be processed within the given standard timeframe are a part of the application backlog.
The department sets its benchmark to keep the level of application processing higher than the application backlog. It fixed the benchmark for all business fields. For instance, IRCC considers a processing time of six months for permanent residence applications.
The IRCC’s webpage concludes that out of the latest 639,500 applications for permanent residence over 47 percent are within the due processing time of service standards.
As for the temporary residence applications of about 1.4 million, 41 percent of them are processed within the standard timeframe of the immigration services.
As observed, IRCC works with the current objective of processing 80 percent of applications as per the given service standards. The webpage of the department displays the information on the processing times and when it will meet its primary objective for all business fields.
The department can meet its aim for programs including the Provincial Nominee Program, Express Entry as well as the Spouses, Partner, and Children’s Program.
