Proposed amendments in Canada’s immigration laws pass by Canadian parliament

Just after receiving its final approval from the House of Commons a week earlier by a vote of 120:90, the proposed amendments in Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) have also been adopted by the Canadian Senate on June 17.

These new legislative amendments have now become part of existing immigration laws, which only require formal assent from Governor General as a last phase of law-making process in Canada.

After becoming the part of IRPA, the new measures will apply to (“new”) applications received on or after February 27, 2008. These new applications could now be scrutinized by visa officers on the basis of demand of an applicant’s skills in the Canadian labor market at time of application, and then selected either for priority processing, retaining until next quarter/year or returning to applicant with full refund. The criteria to scrutinize and select applications will be developed by the Immigration Minister in consultation with provincial and territorial governments and other stakeholders, including the department of Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC), the Bank of Canada, concerned employer and labor organizations. These finalized “set of instructions” would, then, be delivered to CIC visa officers worldwide to guide them in establishing the processing priorities and making fair and transparent decisions.

Those who applied prior to February 27, 2008, will not be subject to the new measures and will be dealt with fairly under the existing rules.

These new measures are also provided few supra-parliament powers to Immigration Minister. For example, the Immigration Minister would now be authorized to set limits on the type of applications (skilled worker or family class, for example) to be processed in a given year.

In addition to being subject to consultations, government will make sure that (a) the ministerial set of instructions will support the fundamental objectives of IRPA; (b) comply with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect prospective immigrants against discrimination; (c) complement the government’s annual levels plan; and (d) publish not only in Canada Gazette after the Cabinet approval but also in CIC’s annual report to parliament and on CIC’s website.

These set of instruction would not apply to prioritize and process applications of convention refugees outside of Canada, family members under federal family class, permanent and temporary residence application filed in-Canada and cases filed outside of Canada on Humanitarian and Compassionate considerations.

After the implementation of IRPA in June 2002, this significant legislative change in Canadian immigration laws will ultimately impact the economy and Canadian family system in coming days. It will entirely replace the current application processing pattern and provide extraordinary powers to Immigration Minister, which in short-term will help Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) in regulating the massive backlog of immigration applications.

As of April 10, 2008, CIC has to process more than 925,000 immigration applications, which include 693,816 applications in Economic Class alone. The New Delhi, Islamabad and London visa posts comprise of more than 41 per cent of total backlog in Economic Class applications. Due to this backlog, the wait times has risen up to 4 to 6 years averagely for an in-process application and more than 6 years for a new application. If no action is taken, CIC has projected that the backlog would grow up to 1.5 million by 2012 with corresponding wait times of 10 years.

As expected, if new measures work as a way to stop the backlog from growing, CIC will then invest additional $109 million in its immigration system by providing additional resources and improving service through administrative measures.

It is in fact not possible to estimate at this time that after becoming the part of immigration laws, how much time this new mechanism would take to deliver the desired results. So, it should be absolutely wrong to suppose that simply after the implementation of new measures, the immigration to Canada would become possible in 12 to 14 or even 24 months. CIC and the Immigration Minister has also not provided any such timeframe.

Finally, the new measures are not meant to change the current pass mark for most of the categories of Economic Class, such as 67 for skilled workers.