Ramping up staff numbers will help clear backlogs, but system-wide innovation is needed to truly reform immigration
Sean Fraser, minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), recently paid a visit to the IRCC processing centre in New Waterford, Cape Breton to announce a range of new measures to make it easier and faster for centres like this one to process applications for permanent residence and citizenship.
The specific measures are easy to describe, but the real meaning and impact are harder to pin down.
To help reduce immigration application backlog, Fraser announced 41 new permanent, full-time positions in New Waterford. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“To help clear our backlog… I’m hiring up to 1,250 new staff by the end of the fall,” Fraser announced, with the stated goal of cutting down wait times for clients looking to relocate to Canada. “Our immigration system has faced unprecedented challenges that has seriously affected our clients over the past few years. One of the things we need to do is modernize our system, if we’re going to be sure our people can keep up with demand. The numbers are coming down rapidly, but we know we can do more and we’re modernizing our systems to help speed up processing.”
On top of increasing the number of staff working on immigrant applications, Fraser announced several other initiatives in the works to expedite the process of establishing permanent residency in Canada, including:
- Expanding applications for permanent residence to 100 per cent digital applications (alternative formats for those requiring accommodations will also be available).
- Rolling out an application status tracker in order to provide clients with better, more timely information about their status.
- Modernizing the citizenship program in general, by providing more online services and moving citizenship tests and ceremonies to virtual spaces. Fraser also confirmed they intend to allow students to attend their courses online if their application processing bleeds into the start of their school year.
The effort to reduce backlogs is being driven by increasing economic pressures.
“Increasingly, ensuring our labour force requirements are growing with the demand is one of our areas of chief concerns,” says Tyler Mattheis, president and CEO of the Cape Breton Partnership. He says large parts of the Cape Breton economy now rely on foreign workers, but employers are wary of investing in international employees when the wait times on their applications can be so long. “We are now a community, a region, with more jobs than people.
“When the federal government takes steps to increase their capacity and efficiencies on the processes required for international people applying for permanent residency or other statuses in Canada, that is a great thing. They’re concerned about that wait time and they’re also concerned about that process.”
Cape Breton Partnership’s labour market and immigration advisor Kelly MacKinnon says, in Cape Breton, foreign workers are pivotal to seasonal industries such as tourism, agriculture, and the fisheries, as well as high-skilled positions in IT and tech startups the local population is unable to fill.
“I think these are absolutely a step in the right direction,” MacKinnon says. “Permanent residence applications moving online will make the process quicker and easier for applicants. And growing the Sydney and New Waterford offices is great, because that’s where a lot of the economic immigration applications [across Canada] are processed.”
Fraser also offers an economic justification for the new measures.
“We’ve so far seen about 115 per cent of the jobs we lost during COVID-19 recovered,” Fraser says. “Our GDP is well in advance of pre-pandemic levels and the rate of unemployment in Canada is the lowest since we started keeping track of our statistics half a century ago.
“Despite these successes, there’s almost 900,000 empty jobs in Canada.”
According to Fraser, 100 per cent of Canada’s growth in the labour force of recent years has been due to immigration.
“We cannot fill the jobs available and grow the local businesses in our communities, sustain those businesses, and protect the jobs of local workers, by going to the domestic labour force,” Fraser says. “We need to bring new Canadians into our communities. [We must] embrace immigration to grow our population and bring families and workers to our shores. When the immigration system works well, we all benefit.”
Akram Al-Otumi, an entrepreneur and Dalhousie lecturer in the innovation and technology sector, says the new measures announced by Minister Fraser are a welcome step forward, but what the system really needs is across-the-board innovation to make it easier and faster to become a permanent resident.
However, adding more staff and increasing online usage are ultimately just tinkering around the edges of the existing system. Although Akram Al-Otumi, an entrepreneur and Dalhousie lecturer in the innovation and technology sector, agrees these initiatives are good news, he knows from experience the existing application process can take too long at the best of times and might be frustrating enough to scare away newcomers who might have otherwise thrived here.
“Instead of increasing the capacity, in my opinion, what they need is innovation. The whole process is super lengthy. Whether it was for me, or for the family I sponsored, the process is beyond normal. Even when we compare the Canadian program with other countries in the world.”
Instead, he hopes Fraser and the department focuses more on innovating the process going forward. Specifically, he thinks they should dedicate an entire department just to identifying redundancies and making the application smoother than ever.
“That will help eliminate unnecessary bottlenecks in the processes and procedures, which lead to reduced waiting times,” Al-Otumi says. “I’ll give you a simple example: you repeatedly mention the same information in too many different forms. The officer who is checking all these papers, they have to read the same information [again and again]. And the same with me, as an applicant, who has to write the exact same information in so many different forms. This information is so similar to each other.
“By streamlining the actual information [required], if they need the information to go to different departments, that could be done… in an online manner. You need that innovation to go and test drive all those processes for each stream.”
Al-Otumi doesn’t mean to diminish the strides Fraser is prepared to take and the willingness to take those strides alone is something he commends.
“I’m happy and optimistic. This minister, he recognizes the issues and they’re working on them. But I also encourage them to do more, with engaging the public. There are a lot of amazing experts out there that can add a lot of value. Engage more. Have more interview groups with people that went through that process. With people who have ideas to improve the process. Because sometimes, ideas come from a very unexpected place.”
Fraser seems to recognize the need for greater reform. He says he hopes people recognize these new changes are just the first steps in a marathon and he hopes the takeaway for potential immigrants is this: We want you here.
“Immigration is about people,” Fraser says. “It’s about starting a new job, reuniting a family, and creating a new life in this beautiful country we call home. As we look to strengthen our immigration system by updating our technology, people (our clients) must be at the centre of all that we do. By adding resources where they are needed and leveraging technology to make processing faster and applying easier for our clients, we can give newcomers and new citizens the welcoming experience they deserve.”
SIDEBAR: By the numbers
•In 2021, IRCC set a historic record by admitting more than 405,000 new permanent residents to Canada. The target for 2022 is 431,000 permanent residents. As of Aug. 22, more than 300,000 permanent residents were welcomed to Canada, surpassing the milestone earlier than in any previous year.
•Canada also exceeded its citizenship goals for 2021–2022, with more than 217,000 new Canadian citizens. So far this fiscal year (from Apr. 1 to July 31), Canada has welcomed more than 116,000 new citizens, compared to 35,000 in the same period last fiscal year.
•On Nov. 26, 2020, Canada became one of the first countries in the world to offer citizenship testing online. By July 31, 2022, more than 406,000 people had taken virtual citizenship tests. Canada is able to invite about 5,000 applicants per week to complete the online test.
•IRCC also started offering virtual citizenship ceremonies on Apr. 1, 2020 and by July 31, 2022 more than 394,000 people had taken the Oath of Citizenship in close to 15,000 ceremonies using a digital platform.
•In March 2022, the launch of applications for the permanent Atlantic Immigration Program was announced. Candidates with a valid endorsement from a business in Atlantic Canada are able to submit applications for permanent residence under the new permanent program. This dynamic program is helping the Atlantic provinces attract more skilled newcomers to fuel economic recovery and drive further growth in the region.
