In late August of 2022, federal Immigration Minister Sean Fraser gave assurances that the unacceptable delays in issuing a visitor visa to Canada would be significantly reduced beginning in October of that year.
The minister argued that his department, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), would hire 1,250 new civil servants in order to settle “by the end of the year” the significant backlog in the production of visas and documents relating to immigration applications.
However, as reported The duty last week, the delays to obtain a visa did not decrease; on the contrary, they exploded. Between Minister Fraser’s commitment and January 2023, the delays, as made public by IRCC, have lengthened for 179 of the 195 countries whose citizens must obtain a visa to enter Canada. And the expectation is downright surreal. A few examples: a year and a half for Tanzania, instead of 64 days last summer, some 500 days for Honduras or Nicaragua, while the wait fluctuated around 80 days. Remember that the normal time frame for the issuance of a visitor visa by IRCC is 14 days.
The department’s explanations are not the clearest: officials are dealing with backlogs that have existed for a long time. Part of this phenomenal backlog was built up during the pandemic. The time per country, as displayed on the ministry’s website, depends on the time it took to process 80% of applications within a two to four month interval. IRCC warned The duty that its numbers “may be skewed by outliers”. It is not surprising that lawyers who assist foreigners in their approach complain about the lack of reliability of the table compiled by the ministry. Whatever the justifications of Ottawa, these delays, while based on dubious data, are inadmissible.
According to the minister’s office, although the figures are deteriorating, things are improving; IRCC’s processing capacity has increased from 180,000 visa applications per month before the pandemic to 260,000 last November.
Sean Fraser is the head of a dysfunctional department. Currently, there are more than 2 million applications of all types pending at the department, including work permits, the granting of permanent residence, decisions relating to asylum seekers and their refugee status, visa applications, etc.
According to an internal IRCC memo dated early December, the Globe and Mail has obtained a copy, the ministry is ready to take draconian measures to get out of this Kafkaesque magma where more than 700,000 visa applications are languishing. According to one of the options considered, admissibility requirements would be dropped: the applicant would no longer have to convince an immigration officer that he would return to his country after his stay (to hold a job, own property or financial assets and have of the family in his country of origin) nor to provide proof of it. Only the security and criminal record check would remain. To get its head out of the water, the ministry is ready to give up assuming its responsibilities. It is quite an admission of negligence.
This negligence is not without consequences. We can think of the economic losses suffered by the tourist industry. But that is not the most important. Thousands of immigrants cannot receive visits from relatives in their country of origin. Or if they get there, it’s after months and months of delay and uncertainty. For a country that wants to be a model of welcoming its immigrants, this administrative laxity sends the wrong message and damages its reputation on the international scene.
Cultural exchanges are disrupted, as are international meetings taking place in Quebec. University conferences and symposiums, which rely on the presence of luminaries from abroad, suffer from it. As reported The duty, a conference, organized by the University of Montreal and, moreover, subsidized by the federal government, could be postponed because visiting researchers cannot obtain their visas in time. The organizer is desperate to see experts from Senegal, Morocco and Cameroon arrive in Montreal. For a Senegalese citizen, the waiting time is 462 days, confirms IRCC. The situation affects not only research activities, but also the international influence of the University of Montreal, which claims to be the most influential French-speaking university in the world.
There is a principle called ministerial responsibility: a minister must answer for his actions (or inaction), but also for those of his officials. This is a principle that we would do well to remember in Ottawa.