The federal government is late in making a decision on more than half of Canada’s permanent residency applications, and is demanding even more patience from asylum seekers and Africans, Canada’s Auditor General has found.
A report tabled Thursday shows that despite its investments and hiring, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada department has not managed to fully catch up on the backlog accumulated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paradoxically engaged in a mad race to break records for admitting newcomers to the country, the government is putting “operational pressure” which ensures that more recent applications are processed. This causes old requests to gather dust in the stack, which is against the best practice of “first come, first served”.
“All permanent residence programs had significant backlogs of applications awaiting processing,” laments Auditor General Karen Hogan.
Especially refugees
The problem of delays particularly affects certain categories of immigration and certain regions of the world. Immigration offices in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a “chronic lack of resources” and are consequently overwhelmed by backlogs of applications. Even if it has the means, the department does nothing to share the burden with other offices.
“For example, the workload of the Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) office was five times higher than that of the Rome (Italy) office, even though the two offices had comparable staff numbers,” observes the auditor.
The Nairobi office in Kenya is also bearing the brunt of this problem. The auditor notes that more than half of government-sponsored refugee files from Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo were in the backlog.
The picture is not entirely negative, since the federal government has managed to improve its processing times for two of the three major immigration categories, namely economic immigrants and family reunification. On the other hand, the situation worsened in 2022 for refugees and people protected on a humanitarian basis.
At the end of 2022, 99,000 permanent residence applications for refugees were still awaiting processing. Since the ministry limits the time of its officials to process these types of files, at a rate of approximately 30,000 files per year, several years will likely be necessary to process the requests already in the system. There are simply too many demands.
“The number of applications submitted under the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program awaiting processing was already three times higher than the number of refugees the department could admit during this year [2022] », writes the agent of Parliament.
This makes the average time frame for the private refugee sponsorship program one of the longest, at 30 months, or two and a half years. The department is regularly behind on its service standards, set at between 6 and 12 months depending on immigration category.
Ever more dusty files
Files that are not processed on time are added to those already in backlog, but old requests also end up being examined. For certain categories, the arrears seem to be slowly decreasing, but the age of those who remain is increasing from year to year. For example, in 2022, old applications for the spousal or common-law partner sponsorship program in Canada had been submitted on average 47 months ago, or almost four years ago.
Karen Hogan blames “management practices” which add up to a year of delay for the smallest detail in the file. To speed up processing, the government has created an automatic method to assess the admissibility of files. However, this is not equally available in all offices.
This particularly penalizes Haitian applicants, “almost all” of whose forms are sent manually, the old-fashioned way. For all these reasons, the Auditor General officially recommends that the government address “racial disparities in processing times” by collecting data on late applications.
In 2022, Canada reached its admission target of 431,645 new permanent residents. The federal target is to welcome 500,000 people by 2025. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has 2,600 employees to process applications for permanent residence, spread across 87 offices in Canada and around the world.