Starting on May 21, 2024 the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) will begin inviting eligible Canadian citizens and permanent residents over the course of approximately two weeks to sponsor their parents and grandparents for permanent residence in Canada. Here is everything you need to know ahead of the May 21 date.
The Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRCC) has been busy making changes to Canada’s family reunification programs in December. In consecutive weeks during this holiday season the Minister has announced important changes to how sponsorship applications for spouses and parents and grandparents will be made in the new year. These changes will affect many families, since the Minister has already announced earlier in October this year that his department expects to admit 84,000 new family members to Canada as permanent residents in 2017.
The beginning of a new year is often a time to contemplate what to expect in the coming months.
An overview of Canada’s approach to family members in the permanent and temporary immigration streams.
Friday, November 20, 2015 Catherine Sas will participate on the panel “Can I Bring the Family?” at the 7th Biennial IBA Global Immigration Conference in London, England
The question of how to sponsor your spouse who is already in Canada seems like a rather simple one. Indeed if you put that question to a CIC call centre representative, their answer is almost always as follows: "If your spouse is in Canada you use the Inland Spousal sponsorship category but if your spouse is outside of Canada, you use the Family Class category". As in most things to do with our Canadian immigration system, the answers to such questions are never that straightforward. Let's review the differences between the Family Class and the In-land Spousal categories.
Canada's Family Class immigration program has historically allowed for Canadians to be able to sponsor their parents and grandparents. However, in November of 2011, Canada's immigration program for parents and grandparents was suspended to allow for a backlog of nearly 165,000 applications to be finalized. The Minister of Immigration introduced the "Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification" increasing processing levels from approximately 15,000 parent and grandparent applications per year to 25,000 applicants for each of 2011, 2012 and 2013.
This past weekend Canada’s Minister of Immigration Chris Alexander formally changed what was previously known as the Live-In Caregiver Program to the new Caregiver Program. Speculation had been circulating for years that the program might be drastically changed including eliminating the Permanent Resident component. Fortunately the residency component has been maintained and the program has been modified to eliminate the need for caregivers to reside with their employers and to allow for speedier processing of permanent resident applications.
Tens of thousands of sponsored family members are admitted to come to Canada every year as permanent residents. While the majority of family members admitted are spouses and partners, the second largest category of admitted family members are the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens and permanent residents.
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