Immigration.ca - Canada Immigration News - March 2013
Canada�s Immigration Minister says that his government has reduced the immigration backlog by 40 percent and drastically reduced processing times for new files.
Despite the controversy over recent policy changes intended to reduce the backlog, the Conservative government is publicly touting its success in bringing the queue down from over 1 million in 2011 to 616,271 at the end of last year.
"Behind every one of those numbers lies a human life, someone who has the hope and expectation of coming to Canada," said Immigration Minister Jason Kenney last week. "We were doing wrong by them and wrong for Canada by making people wait for eight of nine years, and it would be even more wrong to force them to wait for 15 or 18 years, which is where we were headed in many of our immigration programs."
Last year the government introduced moratoriums on several immigration streams, including investors and entrepreneurs as well as parental sponsorship.
However, the most controversial change occurred last spring when the government legislated away the old backlog of applications from before 2008. Hundreds of thousands of applications, some of which had been in queue for up to eight years, were returned with little chance of qualification to re-apply, as policy changes have since strictly limited the kinds of skilled workers accepted through that stream.
Minister Kenney indicated that early next year they will start accepting parental and grandparental reunification files � though only a limited number so that the backlog does not build up again.
Additionally, next month the government plans to start up its new investor program, where applicants will have to find Canadian investors who are willing and able to back them in their ventures.
Source: Ottawa Citize
