In the face of pending immigration backlogs that have notoriously plagued the IRCC ecosystem, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told CBC that “it’s fair to say that in some respects, the way we do the actual day-to-day operations of immigration, refugees and citizenship applications has not adapted to the 21st century.”
In rectifying the apparently outdated nature of immigration application processing, the CBC story further states that Miller is hoping to modernize the system to expedite processing times and cut through the backlog of immigration applications.
Several causes have been advanced for explaining the lack of modern standard in IRCC, of which – unlike popular perception – a shortage of immigration staff is not the leading one.
In fact, IRCC has been reported to already have more than enough personnel to meet its application processing goals for the following three years, as concluded by Canadian parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux.
“Current staffing levels at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) are expected to be more than sufficient to meet the processing time goal for all years of this costing,” Giroux wrote in a report released in March of this year.
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In his report, he looked at the direct costs of processing applications for the economic streams of immigration through the Express Entry system, the Federal Skilled Worker (FSW) program, Canadian Experience Class (CEC), and Federal Skilled Trades (FST) program.
“For 2022 – 23, IRCC is estimated to have 65 per cent more staff than would be required to meet the goal. This percentage will decline each year as the number of applications increases, ultimately reaching four per cent in 2026-27.”
According to the department, it is managing over one million applications from its inventories at any given time.
Of the 2,264,000 total applications in all IRCC inventories, 801,000 are currently reported to be in backlog.
IRCC acknowledges this failure to keep up with application processing standards by claiming to be taking action to reduce the number of backlogs. Its goal, therefore, is to process 80% of applications within its service standards.
Although it reached – and even crossed – its ideal backlog percentage of 20% in early 2023, a recent spike in backlog numbers are edging it closer to the exceeding the target once again.
The success is not uniform across all application types either. While study permits have a low backlog of 15% as of June 2023, temporary resident visa backlogs exceed 45% during the same time-frame. Work permits met and exceeded the 20% target backlogs in March 2023, but have since reached and stabilized at 27%.
Citizenship applications are the most likely to be processed on time, with 76% of 302,000 total applications for grant of citizenship being within service standards. On the other hand, 53% of 644,000 permanent residence applications are within service standards.
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During COVID-19 in 2020, immigration to Canada fell by 45.9 percent, from 341,175 to 184,595 new permanent residents due to travel and public health restrictions.
However, the opening of borders and easing of the pandemic caused the immigration levels to soar back up in 2021, with 406,040 new permanent residents creating a Canadian record in terms of immigrant inflows.
Since then, immigration levels have increased even further by 7.7 percent, reaching 437,120 new permanent residents to set a new record in 2022.
The spike detailed above, however, caused IRCC to be unable to cope with applications in a timely manner and a resultant backlog was created. In fact, October last year witnessed IRCC facing a backlog of 2.5 million applications, despite Canada having injected an extra $85 million into IRCC to reduce processing times in its 2021 Economic and Fiscal Update.
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