Canadian Immigration Processing Times During IRCC Strike
Starting April 19th, 2023, the Public Alliance of Canada declared a general strike. The employees going on strike include the ones working for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). You can learn more about the strike, which government services are affected, and the implications at the official Canadian government website.
This week, Immitracker’s co-founder Blayne Kumar went on a LinkedIn live talk (on The Visto Show) to discuss this strike and how big of an impact it’ll have on Canadian immigration. You can listen to the full recording of the talk here. The discussion was held between him and Josh Schachnow, a Canadian immigration lawyer and Co-Founder of Visto AI.
So what are some of the main takeaways from this conversation?
For one thing, the strike is going to have an impact on one of the most important topics in Canada these days: immigration. More importantly, immigration experts are anticipating an impact on immigration processing times specifically. The processing times had taken a significant hit during the COVID-19 pandemic and were only starting to improve during 2022 when the IRCC made an effort to onboard new agents and improve processing times. Now, due to the strike, the work has significantly slowed down and it’s unclear when it’ll be resumed.
So how can Immitracker help during these difficult times?
Immitracker helps users track their immigration applications and analyze processing times completely for free. In order to do so, users simply have to anonymously log their case into the relevant tracker and compare their processing times with others. During a situation which is as unclear as this strike, users can start to see live if immigration applications are making any progress and how processing times are affected. Additionally, Immitracker provides users with the ability to check in with each other and be notified about new updates in watched cases.
Some of the most popular and active trackers on Immitracker for Canada include the following:
Each of those trackers also has analytical capabilities built into them which allows users to analyze the tracker cases and processing timelines according to the factors most relevant to them (status, nationality, program, etc.).
The Immitracker team sincerely hopes that the strike will be soon resolved by the Canadian government and that the IRCC along with many other public services will be fully restored. In the meantime, we believe that tools like Immitracker can help every immigrant better understand how this situation can potentially affect anyone going through the immigration process.
