Are applicants waiting too long for Canadian residency?

Despite the efforts of the Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada to speed up the processing of applications, most people who apply for a residence permit wait months or years for a response. And the longest wait is for refugees. That's what Karen Hogan, the auditor general, revealed in her report on the work of Immigration Canada. Her office conducted a productivity audit of IRCC and came to the following conclusions.

Audit results in figures

On average, refugees wait about 30 months for a decision on their status — with an estimated 12. Between 15 and 20 months elapse between application and initial assessment. In addition, there is a significant difference in processing speed by country of citizenship (in 7 of the 8 programs studied).

Foreign spouses or common-law partners wait about 15 months to be reunited with their partners in Canada. Processing times have improved in most of the programs auditors reviewed compared to previous years — this is true for economics and family programs. But index is still below established standards, and humanities processing times have even increased.

In 2022, Canada reached the target of welcoming 431,645 new permanent residents. This number is expected to reach 500,000 in 2025. IRCC processes permanent residency applications in 87 offices with approximately 2,600 employees in Canada and abroad.

By the end of 2022, some 99,000 refugee claims were still awaiting processing. Many of these applicants will wait years for a decision under the current processing conditions.

Conclusions and suggestions

IRCC has introduced an online application system — to speed up the process. However, it remains inaccessible to most people, and the Ministry has no way of tracking this. Hogan's team recommends exploring the differences in processing times for applications submitted by different methods, and leveling out those differences. How? By reallocating resources for applications sent for manual processing.

By this moment, IRCC does not have any tool to assess the effectiveness of its tools and to identify and address any unintended differences in outcomes for applicants.

The Ministry should match workloads with available resources in all offices and support these decisions with reliable information on available capacity. At present, this allocation is not very impressive. For example, the Dar es Salaam office in Tanzania had five times the workload of the Rome office in Italy, with a comparable number of staff in both offices.

The ministry should also, according to the auditors, provide clear expectations of the likely timeframe for a decision. In addition, up-to-date online information on expected processing times should be provided for all applications.

At the moment, queues persist, in part because of the department's decision to process new applications ahead of older ones already in the queue. The auditors propose to streamline this system and introduce a strict queue of applications.