Home2022 - Page 2 of 3 - Immigration Lawyer Vancouver, Canada | Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre

As the pandemic slowly winds down and life aims to resume to normalcy, there are lingering reminders of its ongoing effect and one of the most noticeable recent consequences are the world-wide delays of passport renewals. There are news reports from around the globe lamenting the delays in passport issuance not only from Canada but from many leading economic nations including the US, UK, France, Germany and Australia. While the lack of a passport clearly limits the ability to travel internationally, it also has considerable significance in the Canadian immigration realm.

As immigration lawyers we are consulted by a wide range of individuals with a great variety of immigration goals. Interestingly a lot of the questions and concerns that our clients have are the same. If you are considering coming to Canada, it is useful to turn to the basic primary school lesson about the 5W’s - who, what, where, when and why - to ask yourself the essential questions about this process and to prepare yourself as much as possible for the immigration experience.

On April 4, 2022 the Department of Employment and Social Development Canada (“ESDC”) announced sweeping new Temporary Foreign Worker Program ("TFWP") policies that will make it easier for Canadian employers to hire temporary foreign workers (“TFWs”) through the Labour Market Impact Assessment (“LMIA”) process. These policies come on the heels of strong economic reports showing that the Canadian economy has rebounded from the worst effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and that there is currently a high job vacancy rate in the country. Let’s review the three major changes that every employer needs to know!

Caveat Emptor is a long-standing economic maxim meaning “Buyer Beware!’ It is all too applicable in the Canadian immigration process and applicants to Canada need to be fully aware of the risks they face in the midst of pervasive immigration fraud. March is Canada’s Fraud Prevention Month where efforts are made to both raise awareness of and curtail the incidence of fraud and abuse in Canada’s immigration program.

As we enter the third year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, there are no longer any doubts that the pandemic has wreaked havoc on Canadian immigration application processing times. With a reported backlog of nearly two million applications, many applicants are losing patience with the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and are looking for ways to expedite their applications. Facing extraordinary delays, these applicants are turning to the judicial remedy of ‘mandamus’, which is an order issued by the Federal Court to compel a government department such as IRCC to process their applications.