That's fine, both the feds and quebec have 'targets'. But the feds have always been clear that for family sponsorship, the 'targets' are basically just estimates - how many applications they get and how fast they can process them. They are in NO way a limit. (So if the feds didn't change them for years, irrelevant really)
That's the surprising bit - that quebec has started interpreting these as a limit.
I had a look through the
Plan d’immigration du Québec links provided by
@HTS_QC and it's been really interesting to compare them to
statistique.quebec.ca's figures for immigration by category to see how they correspond. Honestly, I'm more confused by the backlog now than I was when I started looking into this.
Thought I'd include a summary of what I've found so far, in case anyone's interested - apologies for the essay!
2017 Target: 12,800 - actual admissions: 12,135
2018 Target: 12,100 - actual admissions: 12,286
2019 Target: 11,700 - actual admissions: 9,686
2020 Target: 10,600 - actual admissions: 7,794
2021 Target: 10,600 - actual admissions: 13, 896
2022 Targets: 10,600 - actual admissions: 12,904
Some of the recent immigration plans even accounted for backlogs carrying over from the previous year. For example,
Quebec's 2021 paper
estimates 2020's admissions at 7,100 (because of Covid) and includes a rebalancing figure:
"2021 Admission target:
Family reunification: 9,700 to 10,200 people. 1,550 admissions postponed from 2020 are also anticipated."
The
2022 paper estimates 2021 admissions as higher than target and accounted for a rebalancing in 2022:
"Family reunification: from 10,200 to 10,600 people. 1,000 catch-up admissions will be added to these regular targets."
For some reason,
the 2023 paper estimated 2022 admissions as on target (ISQ actually suggests 2,000+ over target) and there's no more rebalancing mentioned:
"Family reunification: from 10,200 to 10,600 people."
Although weirdly,
in the 2024 paper, the 2023 review suggests that this year's figure is still a target and not a limit:
"The number of immigrants admitted in the family reunification category is expected to be between 10,600 and 11,000, a slightly higher volume than the planned 10,200 to 10,600 admissions."
But the
multi-year plan for 2024 and 2025 suggests a harder limit:
"Immigration levels in the family class will remain at 10,400 admissions for each year of the multi-year planning."
So - given that the targets have been regularly exceeded since 2021, I can't see where the enormous backlog has come from. It does look like they're clamping down harder on the targets now but not so much that we suddenly have 30,000 people waiting and an outland processing time of 33 months!
I 100% agree with you on the secretive bit. That's what makes this so shady. They also tried to hide behind IRCC and make people think it was IRCC until IRCC essentially outed them. That's super shady. They are doing this to their own constituents and not being honest about it?
Exactly this - people are being told by IRCC that they can't exceed Quebec's limits. Even the website is now saying "The number of admissions is limited to the number of family class spaces set by Quebec for the year" yet Quebec's official documents are presenting them as "targets" instead of limits. The conflicting messages and lack of transparency is just astonishing. I think my next steps are finding out if there are statistics showing the numbers of applications submitted vs processed, and digging into the backlog numbers that are being quoted to see where this figure is coming from.
