Canada has issued a ministerial directive suspending the acceptance of new permanent residency sponsorship applications for parents and grandparents until further notice.
The Canada Gazette published a directive affirming the Trudeau government’s commitment to family reunification while prioritizing the processing of applications received last year.
According to the directive, Immigration Minister Marc Miller believes this will “best support” the government’s objectives regarding immigration and family reunification.
Other immigration streams are also paused for new sponsorships to help reduce the existing backlog.
The government’s immigration levels plan, which aims to reduce immigration levels significantly over the next three years, with the target of admitting over 24,000 individuals through the parent and grandparent streams this year.
The new directive says that a maximum of 15,000 applications submitted through the family reunification program in 2024 will be processed.
In 2024, the parent and grandparent program invited 35,700 randomly selected individuals to submit applications, aiming to accept 20,500 applications.
In Miller’s 2024 annual report to Parliament on immigration, the inventory as of the end of 2023 contained over 40,000 parent and grandparent permanent residency sponsorship applications.
The report revealed that the average processing time for a sponsorship application is 24 months.
