As you might already know if you follow our Twitter account, we sent a request to interview the Minister of Immigration, Chris Alexander or a spokesperson from CIC who would have the chance to explain the current issues from their point of view and show the human side of this institution. His media office says "he is not available" and "no one is available to do an on-camera interview", but they would be willing to answer questions via email.
Disappointed by the lack of human touch of the whole process, we still decided to go ahead and send a first list of questions that you can review here, together with other email exchanges with CIC.
This is the response we received from CIC at the end of March. This is the exact text we received, only the links were added, for reasons we will explain at the end of the quote:
On the Sponsorship Program
The Government of Canada is committed to reuniting as many spouses and partners as possible, as quickly as possible, while ensuring permanent resident targets are met for all immigrant categories.
Canada already has one of the most generous family class immigration programs in the world (1) (and 2); in 2015, nearly 70,000 people will be admitted to Canada in these streams.
We have maintained the highest levels of family class immigration in recent years (3)
We are working to eliminate backlogs and reduce processing times of all kinds.
You will be pleased to learn that we recently launched a pilot project to allow certain sponsored spouses the chance to work much sooner than before (4).
This pilot program will ensure that, during the processing period, applicants will be able to work, provide for their families and contribute to the Canadian economy.
That has been very well received.
It is precisely because of the importance we and the public place on family class immigration that we will ensure that anything further we may do with respect to this stream will be of immediate help to applicants and their families.
On Parent and Grandparent Program
After a two-year pause, the Parent and Grandparent Program (PGP) re-opened, with a cap of 5,000 new applications (5), in January 2014 and again in 2015.
Canada has one of the most generous family reunification programs in the world. We admit more parents and family members than most other developed countries.
Had no action been taken, it was predicted that the backlog could have increased to 250,000 persons with wait times of 15 years by 2015. Because of these decisive actions, wait times are now expected to be just one fifth of that time.
Improving the efficiency of the program will inevitably speed up the process of family reunification for sponsors and applicants.
The Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification has been a success (6) as the government is meeting all of the commitments outlined in the plan.
Additional background information
Applications are processed in the order they are received. Processing times depend on many factors including the number of applications received in a given period of time (7), the complexity of the cases, applicant’s response to requests for additional information, and other factors.
There was no fee increase for sponsoring spouses in 2014.
The electronic Client Application Status tool is available for Sponsoring a spouse or common-law partner in Canada applications (8).
CIC annually meets, and even exceeds, the family class targets set in its annual levels immigration plan.
In Budget 2008, the Department received significant funding to modernize the immigration systems. We have modernized our IT system and are now in a maintenance phase which require less funding.
We do not track demonstrations, but you can rest assured that we are in contact with representatives of the inland spousal sponsorship group.
When we received the email, everything sounded extremely familiar to us.
We have been reading thousands of documents regarding CIC in the last months: press articles, reports, press releases, transcriptions, emails, etc. So, we got to work and this is what we found:
If you click on the links throughout the email quote, you will find the same, or almost the same phrases on the CIC website, on email responses from the office of Chris Alexander, on emails to press replying to inquiries, or in press releases.
Yes, after we gave CIC over a month to answer our questions, we received a copy-paste of several texts previously released by the press department. A very sloppy copy-paste that poorly answered only 4 of our 17 questions.
Of course, we were also invited to request information under the Access to Information Act, which we all know takes months to be released and can be deferred at any time if the responsible office judges that the compilation of the information might interfere with their normal functioning.
It also shows a much better disposition from a public office when they release the information asked because they wish to clarify things, and not because a legal order requires it.
Today, we are sending a follow up email requesting answers to the other 13 questions that remain unanswered, and sending a second list for their consideration.
Dealing with lack of official information
We do have estimations about the numbers that we are requesting CIC. These numbers have been obtained thanks to the organization and massive participation of affected applicants, who have completed extensive databases that give account of number of people awaiting, more accurate processing times and cases of file mismanagement.
Of course, we would feel much better with official numbers from CIC, but given the negative to provide these, we will have to combine facts obtained through Access to Information with testimonials and estimations.
Unfortunately, our attempt to give CIC an opportunity to step up to this issue and show their human side has been unsuccessful. We'll keep trying and, if we are still unsuccessful at the end, it won't be because we didn't try as hard as we could.
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Other links that might interest you:
Inland Spousal Sponsorship: One of the categories that fell further behind
Inland Sponsors' demonstration in Ottawa: Our first day of shooting
Why this affects you as a Canadian
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Sources:
1. Reuniting families and reducing backlogs in Canada's immigration system. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: March 27, 2015
2. Backgrounder — 2013 Immigration Levels Planning: Public and Stakeholder Consultations. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: March 27, 2015
3. Long immigration process 'tearing us apart', Ottawa couple says. The Ottawa Citizen. Published: February 23, 2015. Retrieved: April 1, 2015
4. News Release: Reuniting More Families. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: March 27, 2015
5. Response from the office of Chris Alexander to several Immigration Councils and organizations requesting a meeting about Family Class. Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. Published: February 13, 2014. Retrieved: April 1, 2015
6. CIC Help Centre: Why do some application processing times change and others do not? Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: March 27, 2015
7. CIC Help Centre: How long will it take to process my application? Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: Retrieved: April 1, 2015
8. Check your application status. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: April 1, 2015
Great work guys. But terrible answers, the same most of us received in private emails. Thank you very much for what you are doing for all of us.
ReplyDeleteThe sentence "Applications are processed in the order they are received" makes me laugh, considering what Chris Day wrote me:
"You suggest that applications be treated in the exact chronological order in which they were received. Triaging applications and sorting them into the precise order each was received as part of the open work permit pilot program would actually take valuable resources away from processing work permits themselves and, thus, make eligible recipients wait longer. I hope you can appreciate that we chose to focus on processing work permits more quickly over behind the scenes file sorting".