Some candidates to obtain permanent residence in Canada are being notified that the resolution of their cases could be delayed up to 50 years, according to Canadian media reported this Monday.
Canadian public broadcaster CBC noted that families who have applied for permanent residence for humanitarian and compassionate reasons face waiting times of 12 to 600 months, according to new regulations from the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.
For other immigrants, waiting times are also years: for those who arrive in the country as caregivers, the processing of their application can take 108 months (nine years) while in the agri-food sector the figure is up to 228 months (19 years).
The Canadian Government website that indicates the waiting time indicates that, as of today, people who applied for permanent residence for humanitarian reasons in September will have their cases resolved in “more than 10 years” and that there are currently 49,400 people waiting to receive their decision.
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These wait times have caused alarm among experts, with several immigration lawyers telling CBC that their clients are terrified of being left in limbo for years.
Some speculate that, if not a mistake, it may be a ploy to limit the arrival of immigrants into the country.
For more than a year, the Canadian Government has radically changed its immigration policy after declaring that the country could not absorb the levels of immigration that the Canadian authorities had established, which was causing economic problems.
In 2015, Canada received 300,000 immigrants. In 2022 the quota rose to 431,645, in 2023 it stood at 465,000 and in 2024 it reached 485,000. By 2025, the Government had established a quota of 500,000 people, a figure that was scheduled to be maintained for several years.
Added to these figures are international students (in 2023 there were 682,889) and temporary foreign workers (close to one million in 2023).
But at the end of 2024, faced with growing popular discontent, the authorities announced that they would reduce the number of immigrants that the country would accept by up to 27% in the next three years.
The plan released by Canada’s Immigration Ministry indicated that the number of permanent residents to be accepted in 2025 will fall 21%, to 395,000, compared to the 500,000 initially approved in 2023.
In 2026 the figure will be reduced to 380,000 and in 2027 it will fall again to 365,000, 27% less than what had been announced.
With information from EFE
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