Canada Might Change its Immigration Levels

In July 2011, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism launched a sequence of consultations with stakeholders and the public to talk about the matter of Canadian immigration levels.

The reason of the consultations is to look for feedback on how many immigrants are supposed to be established into Canada every year and to decide a logical mix between economic, family class and protected persons (refugees). Whilst determining the levels of immigration, CIC consider participation from provinces and territories, the ability of the economy and communities to greet newcomers, and current and prospective economic conditions.

CIC also considers its aptitude to process applications in a well-timed manner, which has progressively converted into a problem as a lot of Canadian immigration offices are experiencing large backlogs. There is presently a backlog of almost 165,000 parental and grandparent sponsorship applications alone. The Montreal Gazette freshly hinted in a piece of writing that the Government of Canada might stop accepting immigration applications in total in order to clear the enormous backlogs.

“There’s an limitless number of citizens who want to come to Canada,” said Mr. Kenney in the Gazette article. “We used to have hundreds of thousands of applications more than we could process, and it’s unintelligent and unjust to make people wait seven, eight, nine years for their application to be even looked at. That’s the underlying principle for limiting the figure of new applications.”

In the previous few years, Canada has narrowed the number of immigration applications being accepted. On June 24, 2011, CIC proclaim that a total of 10,000 applications would be accepted for the Federal Skilled Worker Program with a maximum of 500 applications being accepted for each eligible occupation. This is a 50% lessening from the figure of applications accepted in the Federal Skilled Worker Program previous year. It is vital to note that fresh applications are being processed more rapidly than those submitted before the first Ministerial changes in 2008. Applicants who put forward their Federal Skilled Worker applications before February 2008 might put forward a fresh application if they meet the criteria under the new instructions.

With so many applicants wanting to go into Canada as economic immigrants, CIC has recommended that this would be a good chance to set superior standards for their Federal Skilled Worker Program. Earlier this year, CIC also held consultations about the Federal Skilled Worker Program and recommended that the selection principles should be changed, including elevate the level of language skill required to meet the criteria for the program and favouring younger applicants.