Immigrating to Canada? The system is backlogged and at times unfair, a new report confirms

Pretty condemning report, reflecting political and official level weaknesses. Money quotes:

Overall, the report concluded that the Immigration Department’s ability to reduce backlogs is hampered because officials are taking in more applications than what they can handle under the immigration targets the government has set.

Another contributing factor, it said, is the failure of the immigration minister to use his authority “to apply intake controls” during the pandemic.

One despairs at times…:

Immigration applicants have long complained that newer applications are being processed ahead of the older ones, while some visa posts finalize the same files much faster than others.

Those experiences have been validated by the Auditor General in a report released Thursday that found Canada’s immigration backlogs have persisted, with the length of time some permanent residence applications are in the system ballooning in some programs.

The audit focused on eight programs that receive applications in economic, family, and refugee and humanitarian classes, and found a substantial number of applications across all programs remained backlogged at the end of 2022.

The Immigration Department aims to process 80 per cent of applications within its service standards. However, the volume of applications that remained backlogged far exceeded 20 per cent in all programs, with refugees waiting the longest for a decision.

On average, privately sponsored refugees waited 30 months for a decision, while overseas spouses or common-law partners waited an average of 15 months to be reunited with their partners in Canada, compared to the set 12-month service standards. That means, only five per cent of these refugee sponsorship cases and 56 per cent of the spousal applications were processed promptly.

The federal skilled worker program fared worst, with only three per cent of the applications meeting the six-month timeline.

Canada not abiding by ‘first-in-first-out’

The report also found that the length of time backlogged applications spent in the queue increased across all programs — indicating that the department finalized many newer applications over older ones.

In the family class, more than 21,000 applications were finalized within six months of being received, ahead of at least 25,000 older applications that remained in the inventory at the end of the year.

In the provincial nominee program, the time applications remained in the backlog had increased from 12 to 20 months from January to December last year, while for in-Canada spousal sponsorships, the age of the applications rose from 27 to 47 months.

“Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not consistently process applications on a first-in-first-out basis contrary to its operating principle,” said the 40-page report.

That principle was not adhered to, it said, due to other priorities such as the special resettlement program for Afghan refugess, as well as the pressure to complete large volumes of applications to meet the annual immigration targets.

Backlogs vary by country

The report also found differences in the size and age of application backlogs by country of citizenship in seven of the eight audited permanent-residence programs, particularly for government-assisted refugees, federal skilled workers and sponsored spouses who applied from abroad.

For example, in the government-assisted refugees program, more than half of the applications submitted by citizens of Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo were backlogged. By comparison, only one third of Syrian applications were backlogged.

The three countries have the most applications for government-assisted refugee sponsorships, but the visa offices are also under-resourced.

“The department continued to assign application workloads to offices without assessing whether they had enough resources to process them,” the audit said.

The Dar es Salaam office in Tanzania, for instance, had an assigned workload that was five times greater than the Rome office in Italy, even though both offices had a comparable number of staff.

Immigration officials recognized that the visa posts in sub-Saharan Africa were chronically under-resourced but continued to assign files to these offices, which have some of the highest processing volumes for family and refugee programs.

Although the department, with digital applications, has the capacity to redistribute files to let other offices to share the workload, the audit found family-class and refugee-class applications were not transferred out of the Dar es Salaam or Nairobi offices — which both have high workload and application backlogs.

“Department officials told us that they had no plans to transfer backlogged applications to other offices with available capacity, leaving these applicants to wait even longer,” said the report.

“The department did not know whether these offices had the resources they needed to process the volumes of applications assigned to them.”

Canada taking in more applications than it can handle

Overall, the report concluded that the Immigration Department’s ability to reduce backlogs is hampered because officials are taking in more applications than what they can handle under the immigration targets the government has set. (Canada’s annual permanent resident intake grew from 341,000 in 2020 to 465,000 this year.)

Another contributing factor, it said, is the failure of the immigration minister to use his authority “to apply intake controls” during the pandemic.

“From March 2020 through 2021, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada continued to accept applications to its permanent resident programs,” said the report. “But with office closures and travel restrictions, the volume of applications in its inventory grew.”

Despite the launch of a new digital assessment tool and online application portals, the report said the department did not monitor the implementation of its new automated eligibility-assessment tool to determine whether the tool was reducing processing times or to identify and resolve unintended differential outcomes for applicants.

What does the AG recommend?

The Auditor General recommends the Immigration Deportment:

Take immediate steps to identify and address differential wait times to support timely processing for all applicants;

Examine backlogged applications to identify and act on processing delays within its control, and prioritize the older backlogged applications;

Provide applicants with clear expectations of the timelines for a decision; and

Improve consistency of application processing times across its offices by matching assigned workloads with available resources.

“People who apply to Canada’s permanent resident programs should benefit from the government’s efforts to improve processing speeds regardless of their country of citizenship or the office where their application is sent for processing,” the report said

Source: Immigrating to Canada? The system is backlogged and at times unfair, a new report confirms