John McCallum, Canada's Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, has stated that his department plans to speed up processing times for family class immigration, economic immigrants and refugee claimants by applying the lessons learned from bringing 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada over a short period time of only 3 months.
“We have to re-build our whole department in terms of the processes we follow .We can draw on the experience we’ve just had with the refugees,” said McCallum in a speech yesterday at the Metropolis Conference, an annual national conference on immigration issues in Toronto.
“The people in my department, they learned how to do processes concurrently rather than consecutively. They learned how to do things quicker. They learned how to drop certain parts of processes that weren’t really needed."
With processing times that often stretch into two years or longer, McCallum described processing times under the Family class sponsorship applications for parents and grandparents takes more than four years.
The government plans to meet with provincial governments and will look into handing more control over the selection of economic migrants to the provinces through provincial nominee program, he explained.
