Judicial review settlement offer
- Thread starter niloosi
- Start date
Not yet , just accepted the offer few days ago
Any idea how long it would take as well
Unfortunately, a good majority of all Canadian federal workforce has been striking since the past week; let alone IRCC, even the Federal Court is having delays nowadays. I have also been waiting for my own re-determination decision after our settlement, although I don't think it's going to be anytime soon with the current trends.
I never witnessed strike in Canada before, do you think that could delay same as it happened with covid time
Me neither, but I think there is a notable difference between this strike and the past ones: IRCC was not facing a huge backlog back then—it is now. This time, each day in strike means that the already-large backlog just keeps growing.
There's not much we can do at the moment. Expedited requests won't reach their office until after the strike, and pursuing a writ of mandamus would also take time, with the risk that IRCC could swiftly reject your application to "get rid" (i.e., dispose) of it.
It is rather pointless that we have to wait for a re-determination, especially when they admit their unreasonableness themselves and offer you a settlement; under the requirements that they 1) cannot use their AI assistant tool, Chinook, 2) have to assign another officer to your case. and 3) give you at least ten days for submitting your updated documents, rejecting you only means that they have to try harder in the next potential judicial review case to defend their actions. Then again, the rejecting officer never faces any repercussion or penalty, nor does the IRCC or Department of Justice ("DoJ") ever notify them of their "unreasonable" action; for that matter, Canadian law just seems to be full of these loopholes and questionable procedures.
I'm just glad that I did my Judicial Review myself and only paid the notarial and $50 CAD court fee; the IRCC might not process my re-determination in time for the upcoming university summer term, but I at least had my fun and learnt a lot of things from dealing with the Court and DoJ.
There has been an update: the Strike has ended. Nevertheless, a nearly 3-week-long strike is surely going to leave its impact on IRCC's visa application backlog.
Strikes have nothing to do with the current status of a workplace. Strikes happen quite regularly in Canada but the scale of strike is what was uncommon.
Government of Canada's website literally mentioned, among many other things, processing applications as one of the "[s]ervices partially or fully disrupted"; I think it is safe to say that the Strike, especially one of this scale, had quite a lot to do with the Federal Government's workplace in its entirety, let alone IRCC's capability to process normal (or even prioritized, as per their saying) applications.
Even the most basic services of their workplace were, in fact, affected: since the start of the Strike on April 19, 2023, IRCC could not even update their so-called "weekly" processing times page, which still mentions the processing time of an outsider's study permit as just "7 weeks"; as of May 2, 2023, more than two weeks since the Strike, their page still reads as follows: "Last update: April 18, 2023."
The hyperlinks that I've linked here are today's snapshots saved by the Wayback Machine; so, we can compare the "current" 7-week processing time, for a study permit application submitted outside of Canada, with the post-strike version, whenever it gets updated, and see whether or not their workplace got affected.