Hi fellow applicants. We applied on October 10 and received our first AOR 11 days ago on Mar 12. Nothing after that so far. In tracker, I see some of the applicants getting their SA, Bio and Medical immediately (like within a day or two) after AOR. How is it possible that some applications are being processed so quickly than others? Also, how come applicants in Nov and Dec are far ahead in their process compared to Oct?
TIA.
For the first part of your question (why bio/meds/SA taking longer): could be they are checking the sponsor eligibility, which can be more involved for some (e.g. checking no social assistance, I think requires going to the provinces). But there is some randomness in this that is not entirely clear, too. (Also there are some countries that do medicals towards end of process, not beginning - and in some cases it seems they may have delayed sending biometric requests where the VACs were closed and not doing biometrics).
As for Nov/Dec/Jan/Feb going faster: IRCC seems to have 'rebooted' with new ones coming in going to a separate team. Presumably this is to increase overall volume - like there is some bottleneck in dealing with backlogged files (physically, like lack of space to deal with applications received before some date) and it's just more efficient to split. Mind, this is tea-leaf reading, we don't really know.
And no, it's not 'fair' - but clearly they've made a choice that it's also not fair or efficient to hamper 'recovery' by sticking to a strict 'process by date received' method.