Immigration.ca - Canada Immigration News - February 2008
This week, the official opposition in Ottawa released data showing that immigration processing times are, on the whole, increasing and that the times themselves vary greatly depending on the country in which they are being processed.
This data is damaging to the current Conservative government, who were vehemently critical of the Liberal government’s immigration policies when they were the official opposition. They claimed that, once in power, they would maximize efficiency so that separated families could be reunited as well as to allow more skilled immigrants to arrive quickly and ease Canada’s critical labour shortage.
It was Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis who collected and analyzed the latest data for the opposition party. He found an overall increase of 20 per cent in processing times since 2004. He also discovered that a skilled worker application processed in Paris, on average, would take approximately 15 months while the same application in Kyiv could take nearly 71 months to process.
The Conservative government does not argue with the data compiled by Karygiannis, but the two main political parties do disagree on the cause of these trends. The Conservatives argue that the inefficiencies and discrepancies in bureaucracy trace back to prior Liberal government policies that were inherited when power changed hands in 2006.
The office of the Immigration Minister claims that an 800,000 person back-log had built up at that time and that they did their best to address the most pressing issues in priority, which they determined to be the sponsorship applications to reunite families. Karygiannis’ research supports this claim, showing a decrease in processing times for children and spouses.
The Minister’s office also asserts that it is not realistic to expect all of the problems to be solved “overnight”, despite their repeated claims, while in opposition, that they would improve the system.
“They promised (in opposition) that they were going to fix everything, shorten wait times, and everything was going to get better,” Karygiannis said. “But under the Conservative regime things have gotten worse instead of better.”
One possible solution offered up by the opposition would be to shift resources from the more efficient centres to the less efficient ones – a policy already being instituted by the Conservative government who announced last week such a shift to the Philippines.
New Democrats suggest using the surplus of money coming in from visa application fees, and putting it towards the hiring of additional staff to speed up the processing times and allow for more skilled workers to enter Canada quickly.
Source: Canadian Press
