January 2023

Last month, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser posed in a photo op with international students on the floor of a USP facility. The tweet that accompanied the photo boasted that letting international students work 40 hours a week instead of 20 would have a ‘positive impact on their ability to support themselves financially while studying in Canada.’

December 2022

First comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes an interminable wait for IRCC to process a sponsorship application.

Currently, Family Class applications have a processing time of 18 months. That’s a really long time for newlyweds to put their lives on hold.

As described in our previous newsletter, Visitor visas for romantic partners: tough to get, but not impossible; it can be very difficult for the romantic partners of Canadian citizens and permanent residents to get visas to come to Canada as visitors. For couples wishing to apply for a visitor visa for the sponsored spouse to come to Canada during the processing of the application, IRCC now has a policy applying the ‘dual intent’ section of our immigration legislation:

November 2022

One of the best books I’ve ever read about Canadian immigration is Maximum Canada: Toward a Country of 100 Million. In it, Globe and Mail international affairs columnists Douglas Saunders argues that Canadian immigration policies instituted by Britain led to Canada being underpopulated and deprived it of the critical mass of individuals necessary to create an economic environment conducive to innovation and entrepreneurship. This led and continues to lead to the ‘out-migration’ of Canada’s best and brightest, with the USA the primary beneficiary.

October 2022

IRCC has just announced the details of the 2022 Parent and Grandparent Program, and it will be of great disappointment to anyone hoping to apply who didn’t submit an interest form in 2020.