Canadian immigration applications, approximately 60,000, remain under-processed due to a lack of proper management. The recent Access to Information and Privacy request made this revelation. Reportedly, around 799 inactive IRCC officials were obligated to process 59,456 pending applications. Moreover, these inactive officials didn’t have access to the Global Case Management System. This system is IRCCs common system for managing and processing immigration applications.
Unfortunately, the pending, active cases were allotted to inactive officers across Canada’s airports, processing centers, border ports, and Consulates in offices across India, the Philippines, Brazil, and the U.S.A.
The ATIP request helped in acquiring critical information about the inactive immigration officers. This information includes the unique placeholder codes, which are visible on the applicant’s GCMS notes. Furthermore, it will also reveal their last login date and the number of applications allotted to them.
GCMS Notes for Canadian immigration applications
Individuals have the opportunity to request GCMS notes through the ATIP request. The GCMS notes will further reveal all the notes of IRCC on the applicant’s immigration application. Additionally, these notes will consist of all the correspondence with IRCC and other information based on the officer’s review of the application.
As of now, there’s uncertainty revolving around the IRCCs decision to assign applications to inactive officers. However, as per speculations, IRCC couldn’t remove the information of these officers on the GCMS due to the fear of losing the ability to trace.
Expected changes
Under grave scrutiny and the increasing demand for immigrants across Canada, IRCC took several initiatives to fight the huge application backlog. Moreover, the department recruited at least 1,250 additional staff members and promised to increase the use of modernized Data Analytics to speed up the application process. Furthermore, it invested millions in building a widened digital system for applications. This measure is likely to replace the GCMS the next year.
Fortunately, as of December 2, the application backlog also witnessed a decline with 2.2 million applicants. IRCC continues to pick up its pace to deal with the huge number of immigration applications. Consequently, the impact is clearly visible on immigration streams comprising small targets, such as the Parents and Grandparents Program. The PGP makes annual selections based on a lottery system.
Moreover, over the past two years, IRCC has been renewing the 2020 pool’s applications. This is a clear distinction from the previous methods. As a result, the elderly PGP applicants have to suffer the imbalanced impacts.
Even though IRCC took a number of measures to balance the Canadian immigration applications, the department is taking time to reach its pre-pandemic processing time. Moreover, IRCC must keep working on these shortcomings and deliver a more balanced application processing.
