Bracing for a long, long wait: The harsh effects of the 2024 immigration levels plan. - Immigration Lawyer Vancouver, Canada | Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre
 

BlogBracing for a long, long wait: The harsh effects of the 2024 immigration levels plan.

21 October 2025

In the aftermath of the introduction of last year’s immigration plan in November 2024, the government made clear that there were going to be tougher times for prospective immigrants to Canada. The proposed targets of 500,000 immigrants per year for 2025/26 set just a couple of years earlier in 2023, were being slashed to 395,000 for 2025 and 380,000 for 2026. The Liberal government woke up one morning and realized that they had somewhere between 2-3 million temporary residents in Canada, most of whom were expecting to become permanent residents, and that we simply couldn’t absorb that many people. So the targeted numbers had to move downward. However, no one could have anticipated the actual effect on immigration processing for those applicants brave enough to continue forward.

After the election in April 2025, Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed a fresh Cabinet with a new immigration minister – Lena Diab.  Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) presented Minister Diab with a “Transition Binder” in May 2025 that had some stark figures for consideration.  Those figures, and the reality of what they represent are being felt by prospective applicants and the effect is chilling.

The IRCC Transition Binder 2025-05 holds some shocking statistics about current processing times for various application streams.  The most dramatic are as follows and are current as of the second quarter for 2025:

  • Start Up Visa (SUV) applications: 420 months (35 years)
  • Agrifood applications: 228 months (19 years)
  • Caregiver applications: 108 months (9 years)
  • Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot (EMPP): 54 months (4.5 years)

While these statistics are for newly submitted applications as of mid-2025, they paint an extremely bleak picture.

Further telling information is the current inventory of applications versus the planned admissions in accordance with the levels plan:

Application type Inventory Admissions(YTD)    2025 processing rates
SUV 38,600 1,300 2%
Agrifood 8,900 450 5%
Caregivers 34,400 4,200 14%
EMPP 2,500 375 12%

When you see the current volume of applications and the targeted admission levels it is not surprising to see the corresponding processing times of many, many years.

The processing prospects for Humanitarian and Compassionate (H and C) applications is not any better.  When standard processes for immigration are reduced or cut off, people turn to other avenues and in this case, it is the H and C application process which is a discretionary application. There are no set criteria for H and C applications and so people need to “make their case” as to why they deserve to be processed for permanent residence on “discretionary” grounds.   This past August I discussed the limitations of the H and C process and my projections that demand would increase.  Please refer to our blog entitled “Baby it’s cold out there….and it’s going to get colder! Why the Humanitarian and Compassionate application is not always the answer

As it turns out, my predictions have proved correct as has recently been reported in the CBC article “50-year immigration wait stuns lawyers and families, but IRCC says it’s no mistake”.  In the article CBC refers to IRCC’s own current data (as of October 9, 2025) for the processing of H and C applications as listed on its website with timelines of more than 10 years! IRCC reports there are currently 49,400 people with pending H and C applications in the queue.

To understand the reasons for such lengthy processing times we have to go back to the 2024 levels plan which lists IRCC’s targets for H and C applications as follows:

2025 2026 2027
H and C targets  10,000 6,900 4,300

However also included in the Minister’s levels report for 2024 were the number of H and C applications processed for 2022 at 10,199 and 2023 at 14,355, respectively.  You can see that there is a clear downward trend for the number of H and C applications that IRCC will be processing such that the cases to be processed in 2027 will be 50% less than that of 2025 and much, much less than the cases processed in 2022 – only 5 years ago!

There is no question that writing a blog about numbers and statistics is never that engaging.  But it is essential to understanding immigration processing and predicting your chances for success or being able to make any application at all.  With the current processing levels and targets, it really boils down to simple arithmetic:

Immigration applications increasing + Immigration targets decreasing = Increased processing times.

For our other recent discouraging blogs about the state of Canada’s immigration program please refer to our earlier posts:

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