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Waiting game to get into Canada is unfair say MPs and lawyers
By Lucy-Claire Saunders in Vancouver and Gurmukh Singh in Toronto
The waiting time for people wanting to migrate to Canada is getting longer and longer, especially for immigrants from some countries including India.
According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada figures, the waiting period for would-be immigrants has gone up by 20 per cent since 2004.
Further, the waiting period varies widely across countries and immigration categories.
If you are a skilled worker from Latin America you can enter Canada within 14 months. But if you are from India, you have to wait 62 months.
One can get one’s parents and grandparents in Canada from London in 11 months. But one has to wait 45 months if they happen to be in India.
Giving this information, Toronto MP Jim Karygiannis, who received it under the Access to Information Act, said it might take someone 2,300 times longer to come here if he applied from a particular country and under a specific category.
Giving more examples, he said a dependent child from China could be cleared to enter Canada within four months, while it could take about three years for a dependent child in Cairo to come to Canada.
Questioning the method and pace of application processing at different Canadian missions, the opposition MP said there should be no discrimination against any particular nation or profession.
“Things should move at the same length of time — whether it’s from Greece, from Europe, from south Asia, or from China,” he said.
Immigration lawyers and rights advocates said the long wait times are cruel and discriminatory.
“The federal government is not telling people how long it will take for their applications to be processed,” said Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver. “They only provide historical information, not prospective information.”
Applicants who visit Canada’s citizenship and immigration website will find processing times from around the world, which are based on the previous year.
“People deserve to know exactly how long they must wait before they plunk down processing fees,” Kurland said. “It’s elementary consumer protection information.”
Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesperson, Karen Shadd-Evelyn, said no country is prioritized over another but local conditions, like mail service, play a factor in determining how low long an applicant must wait.
But she also added that certain types of applications are prioritized, such as provincial nominees, family reunification, and investors or entrepreneurs.
Catherine Sas, a Vancouver-based immigration lawyer, says that by prioritizing these categories of applicants, the skilled worker applicant has been bumped down the list.
“Skilled workers have become the ‘left-over’ category,” she said. “In the simplified application process, they pretty much buy a place in queue and when their time comes, however long it may be, they can either continue to immigrate or get their money back.”
However, applicants can only get their money back before they are contacted by a visa officer.
Jagtar Singh, whose brother has been waiting for a visa for more than a year to come work in Vancouver’s hospitality industry, is amazed at how slow the process has become. “People lives are put on hold while they wait for these applications to be processed,” he said. “They need answers in a quick and timely fashion.”
Currently, Canada has an immigration backlog of more than 800,000. The present Tory government says it rose from 50,000 to current levels because of the negligence during the 10-year rule of the Liberal party.
There have been suggestions to raise the intake of immigrants to 260,000 each year to clear this backlog.
It has also been proposed that 80,000 foreign students studying in Canada should be allowed to apply for permanent residence from within Canada to meet the shortage of skilled workers and ease pressure on missions abroad.
Currently, a skilled worker or foreign student in Canada has to apply for immigration from outside of the country.
Lalit Sharma, who owns Mumbai Masala in North Vancouver, says there is a shortage of skilled labour so over the years, he has helped bring six immigrants from India to work at his restaurant and his previous restaurant, Mauryea. But the process is timely and costly.
“The government says it only takes three to six months to migrate to Canada but it’s more like one to two years,” he said.
Often by the time help arrives, it’s too late to make a difference, added Sharma.
“I’ve just started the process for another worker to come from India but how long it takes before he actually comes is anyone’s guess,” he said.
Karygiannis recently had the opportunity to visit India. His trip included visits to the Punjab, Haryana, and New Delhi.
In the Punjab, he met with current and past political figures as well as with religious leaders at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. While in the Punjab, Karygiannis also met with the Chief Minister Sardar Parkash Singh Badal where discussions were held about a pension plan for India
Meanwhile, with the latest census showing a 35 per cent increase in its speakers since 2001, Punjabi is set to become the fourth largest spoken language in Canada. Today, it is the sixth largest spoken language after English, French, Chinese, Italian and German, though it is already at the fourth position in the province of British Columbia.
But as India overtakes China as the largest source of immigration for Canada this year, Punjabi is projected to surpass Italian and German by 2011 to become the fourth largest spoken language in the country.
According to Balwant Sanghera, president of the Punjabi Language Education Association (PLEA), which is celebrating the sixth International Mother Language Day Feb. 24, “Punjabi is growing by leaps and bounds in Canada, and within the next three to four years it will become Canada’s fourth largest spoken language.”
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