On January 21, the department submitted the memo to the IRCC’s Deputy Minister. In the government, the deputy minister is the non-elected senior officer who provides technocratic advice.
According to a new memorandum released by the government, the Express Entry plans for this year remain undecided. However, IRCC will soon resume the invitations for FSWP and CEC in 2022.
The memo contains the following key points:
- The invitation round for FSWP, CEC, and FSTP candidates will restart this year.
- Until March 31, the department is delaying the FSWP, CEC, and FSTP invitations while the department will continue the PNP invitations.
- IRCC will be able to address the inventory backlog by continuing the pause, and IRCC’s evolving priorities will determine the length of the pause.
- In March, the IRCC department will present a plan for the future of the Express Entry invitations to the Deputy Minister to analyze the time and volume aligned with processing time objectives and Immigration Levels Plan 2022-2024.
- The memo further stated that the IRCC department believes that the Express Entry pool candidates, including work permits on hold, will continuously face uncertainty in short terms.
- In the short-term, Express Entry candidates will face uncertainty, according to the IRCC.
- The Express Entry application’s backlog rises due to pandemic and IRCC’s target too achieve 401,000 immigration in 2021. For this, IRCC mainly focused on landing in-Canada candidates to the country. Due to backlog, the average application processing time for express entry exceeded the standard of six months.
- To reach the 6-month service standard, the IRCC must reduce the backlog for new applicants by more than 50 percent.
However, the IRCC website continuously displays the express entry processing standard for six months.
The Express Entry Draw
Till now, most economic class immigrants landed in Canada by Express Entry.
Before the covid scenario, the IRCC department organizes the Express entry draw twice a week and invites the high scoring candidates to apply for Canadian citizenship.
FSWP and CEC candidates received most of the invitations, and FSTP candidates received only 1% of them.
Typically, the time fixed by IRCC to process the PR applications was about six months.
When the pandemic started, around March 2020, Only CEC and PNP candidates were invited by the IRCC department. At that time, covid caused disturbance worldwide, and Canada also imposed travel restrictions, due to which IRCC found it best to invite CEC candidates living in Canada as they could apply for permanent resident visas.
To support
The labor market need across the country was fulfilled by the PNP draws, and the same year, FSWP candidates were also invited by IRCC to its Express Entry draws. After that, no further draws were held for FSWP candidates.
In January 2021, IRCC invited loads of CEC candidates to achieve its goal of 401,000 immigrants for 2021. For this, IRCC desired to transition as many possible in-Canada immigrants to Canadian PRs as 1/3 of the total 405,000 immigrants were landed in Canada last year via the CEC program.
In addition to this, last year, between May to November, IRCC also enforced the Temporary to Permanent Residence (TR2PR) program. As per this program, students and workers living in Canada can apply for PR visas.
Due to extreme focus on CEC candidates and the TR2PR program, the IRCC’s backlog bulges, and the department fails to accomplish its service standard of processing applications within six months.
After this, in September 2021, IRCC paused its CEC invitations too.
In February 2022, IRCC disclosed its new Immigration plans for 2022-2024. According to it, IRCC will lower Express Entry admissions so that it can work on TR2PR program applications in 2022 and 2023.
Due to this, PNP will become the first economic class admissions pathway, and the Express Entry rank will rank lower to it.
IRCC has set a target of over 110,000 immigrant admissions by 2024 to return Express Entry to the top of its economic class.
According to the memorandum released by IRCC, the pause in FSWP and CEC applications creates uncertainty for immigrants, and CEC candidates are in fear of losing their status and worrying if they are forced to leave their jobs and the country. However, IRCC has not provided any indication as to whether it will offer CEC candidates the opportunity to extend their temporary status.
IRCC is Processing applications at a higher pace. Within 2 weeks, it processed 4,000 FSWP backlog applications
To come out of the Express Entry backlog, IRCC is capturing the speed. If IRCC continues with this pace, it will reduce the backlog up to 50% by this May.
This can not guarantee the FSEP and CEC invitations, but they may resume after bringing Express entry back to normal.
Within two and half months, IRCC processed more applications than the whole year.
IRCC processed over 4,300 FSWP applications alone in February 2022, which was much more than it was processing monthly in 2021.
Approximately 41,300 people are in the FSWP inventory as of March 15, a decrease of about 4,000 in the previous two weeks.
IRCC achieved this number in only two weeks compared to last year’s data. In 2021, it took around seven months to achieve this.
If IRCC continues with this speed, the FSWP backlog could be brought to zero till the end of the year 2021.
IRCC aims to reduce CEC backlog to zero by this spring
According to the present data, the CEC backlog contains around 10,000 people.
IRCC is trying to reduce this number as soon as possible. Within the last two weeks, IRCC processed around 2000 people from the CEC backlog.
If IRCC holds the present processing rate, it could lower the CEC backlog by the spring.
Relief for FSWP and CEC Candidates
As the new memo released by IRCC majorly focuses on Express Entry, there are good signs for FSWP and CEC candidates too.
IRCC discloses that the department is going to restart the invites for FSWP and CEC candidates. They further stated that they are processing FSWP applications at a higher pace, which immigration minister Sean Fraser supported. Sean Fraser announced that the department will restart in the “near term.”
Apart from this, IRCC invited 924 PNP candidates via Express Entry to apply for immigration yesterday.
