Sean Fraser provides updates on the Immigration backlog, the Canadian Immigration Minister Sean Fraser spoke this morning in Vancouver, British Columbia, regarding the Canada Immigration backlog that Canada is experiencing (Aug 24th, 2022)
IRCC Minister discusses current efforts to reform Canada’s immigration system with an emphasis on managing labour shortages, reducing backlogs, enhancing client experience and reuniting families.
IRCC’s strategy to solve this problem is to complete the hiring of up to 1,250 more personnel by the end of the fall, that way they will boost processing capacity and reduce the Canada Immigration backlog. IRCC says the new hires will decrease application wait times and allow new applications to be processed at pre-pandemic levels, including the service standard of six months for Express Entry programs.
The number of requests to immigrate to Canada nearly tripled during the pandemic. According to the most recent IRCC data obtained by CIC News, the backlog stood at nearly 2.7 million applicants in mid-July. However, according to the latest data released by IRCC today, the Canada Immigration backlog has decreased to about 2.4 million applicants as of July 31.
According to the new IRCC website, 47% of the current 639,500 permanent residence processes are within the agency’s service standards.
Meanwhile, 41% of the 1.4 million temporary residence applications it receives meet its service standards.
Approximately 65 percent of the 379,000 citizenship applications currently being processed meet IRCC service standards.
Canada has welcomed 405,000 new permanent residents in 2021, the goal for 2022 is to hit 431,000 based on the Immigration Level Plan.
From January 2022 to now (August 2022) 275,000 new permanent residents have arrived in Canada. Also, 349,000 work permits have been issued (including 220,000 OWP (open work permit) and 360,000 study permits, compared to the prior year which is an increase of 31% so far.
In conclusion, the reason why the IRCC backlog is tremendous this year is due to responding to humanitarian crises and updating aging technology to meet demands.
IRCC’s main goal is to reduce the number of applications that have been standing on their system longer than its service standards, 54% of the applications in their inventories at the end of July were evaluated as backlog.
Canada sees the necessity of improving its immigration system to increase the ability to find top talents from around the world and help the labour shortage in areas such as tourism, health care, agriculture, etc…
One of the solutions to keep everyone updated regarding the processing time of applications and reduction of the Immigration backlog is posting monthly data on the IRCC website.
If you want to start your process to come to Canada and/or check the status of your application, book your consultation and let MDS Consulting do the work for you.
To know more about the Canada immigration backlog plan and the updates from Canada’s Immigration Minister Sean Fraser, click here
To watch the announcement, click here