IRCC Explains the hold on FSW & CEC Nominations

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada shared a summarized version of their latest Memo discussing the reasons for the hold on inviting Federal Skilled Workers and Canadian Experience Class to apply for Canadian permanent residency. The hold on invitations can be observed since December of last year 2020. IRCC justified it by mentioning that their initial plan after implementing the hold was to tackle with backlog applications. The memo was shared to CIC news by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. To begin with, the department focused on “aggressively” inviting Canadian Experience Class candidates and applications that were pending under TR to PR pathway. The sole objective of this measure taken was to achieve the target of 401,000 immigration umbers that were set out in the Immigration Levels Plan 2021-2023.

As a conclusion to this measure, IRCC was faced with high amounts of application submission for the active immigration categories. In addition to this, they had delayed processing time, more than usual, for all economic class immigration. As per the IRCC memo, the number of application submitted were reported at 1.5 million in July 2021 which rose to 1.8 million on 27^th October 2021. IRCC paced with the processing of these applications by finalizing 108,500 candidates on 3^rd September 2021 following 99,968 applications processed and finalized by 27^th October, 2021.

It is clearly stated in the IRCC memo that “In order to meet the Afghanistan resettlement objectives, a need of trade-offs was created in categories like Spousal Sponsorship, Canadian Experience Class and TR to PR pathway. This has resulted in a speculation that 2021 might end with Permanent Residence application inventory of 760,000 people and Economic Class application inventory of 360,000 people.” Looking at these numbers, IRCC aims to cut the Express Entry backlog by almost a half for it to achieve their Express Entry application processing standard of six months or less. The ending of the memo states that senior IRCC officials plan to return to the department’s highest ranking civil servant, the Deputy Minister Catrina Tapley, in November 2021. They plan to process Express Entry applications for intakes throughout the remaining year, 2021 and early 2022.

This year IRCC held a total of 33 Provincial Nominee Draws and 27 Canadian Experience Class Draws inviting 17,785 and 133,868 candidates respectively.