Canadian Immigration Minister Says Department Will Apply Lessons to Reduce Processing Times

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Canadian Immigration Minister Says Department
Will Apply Lessons to Reduce Processing Times
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Canada's Minister of Immigration, Refugees
and Citizenship, John McCallum, has stated that
his department aims to speed up processing times
for family class immigration, economic immigrants
and refugee claimants by applying the lessons it
learned from bringing 25,000 Syrian refugees to
Canada over recent months. We have to
re-engineer our whole department in terms of the
processes we follow, the speed at which we do it
and we can draw on the experience weve just
had with the refugees, said McCallum in a speech
yesterday at the Metropolis Conference, an annual
national conference on immigration issues in
Toronto.With processing times that often stretch
into two years or longer, McCallum described
processing times under the Family Class of
Canadian immigration as "a mess." Processing of
sponsorship applications for parents and
grandparents takes more than four years. We want
to reform our own economic immigrant processes,
added McCallum. The government plans to meet with
provincial governments and will look into handing
more control over the selection of economic
migrants to the provinces through the Provincial
Nominee Programs, he explained.