The Auditor General of Canada’s report on the reasons for the delay in the review of immigration cases was published

According to the Toronto Star, according to Karen Hogan, Auditor General of Canada, inefficient management practices of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada officials and changing priorities have caused applicants to face long waiting times.

According to this report and considering that Canada’s new immigration program shows the admission of 465 thousand people this year, 485 thousand people next year and 500 thousand people in 2025, the question has been raised whether this department has the capacity to deal with this Does it have the volume of requests?

Over the past year, the immigration program focused on eight Canadian permanent residence programs in the economic, family and refugee and humanitarian categories, all of which have been delayed. Canada seems to receive more requests than it can handle.

With all these conditions, Mark Miller, the country’s immigration minister, pointing out the importance of immigration in Canada’s long-term success, announced that in order to improve conditions and reduce the number of delays, he will continue to digitize programs, hire and train new employees, and use automation to increase processing capacity and efficiency. . However, the Auditor General believes that the Immigration Department has not monitored the implementation of its new digital tool to determine whether the processing time has been reduced or not. Or what were its unwanted effects on the applicants.

Immigration officials aim to process 80 percent of applications on the same timeline as the department’s service standards, but data shows the backlog at the end of last year exceeded 20 percent, with refugees experiencing the longest wait times. The federal Skilled Workers Program fared the worst, with only three percent of applications meeting the six-month timeline.

The auditor general criticized Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada for not always processing applications based on their priority, contrary to its operating principle. In addition, backlogs appear to vary by country, for example in the asylum program, more than half of applications submitted by citizens of Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo were delayed, while only one-third of applications from Syria were delayed.