(Unpopular Opinion Alert)
Everyone is "excited" about the new site that shows prohibitions etc... yet what people don't understand is, the backlog is not moving at a very decent speed. It really is just a pr stunt to calm people down lol. Let's wait until December to see if we get our test invites.
They keep inviting 90k people for permanent residency, and we take the back seat. Gotta keep paying those taxes still and the citizenship fees they promised not to charge.
I'd like to see some numbers and facts, if you are going to respond to my comment.
The situation looks grim, for sure. The new tracker shows a little more information than the ECAS ever did and it is nice. But that does not mean all of us changed our minds and now think IRCC is doing a great job. If you think that the majority of the people can be just wooed or swayed by a flashy new dashboard, well, think again. People can see the data and understand the grim situations themselves.
There are stats and discussions in the
IRCC corporate records that was requested via ATIP. Some offices are working more efficiently than others. This is a massive document, we are working towards summarizing the content of the document.
I glanced through that document and I saw some very disturbing stats. Some busy offices like Mississauga have more than 10,000 applications ready to be tested but only issued around 300 test invites at the end of Jan.
The number of pending applications towards the end of December 2020 was far greater than the advertised 85,000.
Below are some of the sentiments expressed by people on this forum :
Prash42's comment
MrChazz's comment
Prash42's second comment
If you go through the posts in the relevant threads, you'll see more negative attitudes towards IRCC (and rightly so because of their lack of transparency) will surface. A large number of people believe that IRCC is not doing "everything it can" to fix the hot mess we are in.
Having said that... You should consider the following :
1. The timeframe between application submission and AOR has decreased and gone back to pre-Covid timelines.
2. The time between AOR and IP has also significantly decreased and is at Pre-Covid levels now
3. Though the time between IP and Test invites are NOT great by any means, they have improved from before. Until February this year, hardly any 2020 applicant received a test invite. However, since March 2021 - the number of invites have grown by a bit and now applicants as far as September 2020 have been receiving test invites.
4. One thing to note here is that the test invites are issued by local visa offices, not CPC Sydney. The local office will issue invites based on the staffing they currently have. Montreal and Vancouver seem to be doing a good job sending requests sooner while some offices in the GTA are lagging behind. This is the point where the concerns start.
5. As long as your application is routine (no FP, no additional document requests and no interview), you might expect processing times that are a tad bit better (12 - 18 months total processing time from date of submission). Even before Covid, a sizable number of applicants were being processed in the 12 - 18 month timeframe).
6. Their aim was to issue at least 2000 test invites a week in Jan and the corporate records show that last 3 weeks of Jan, they issued more than 2000 invites consistently every week. Not sure how the data looks for months after Jan 2021.
7. The time between test and oath is very much concerning. I will wait for more updates on the spreadsheet to see what the timelines look like.
I agree that "more should be done to speed up the process" but this depends on the local offices acting swiftly as well. I "hope" to see the volume of test invites increased significantly sometime in the near future.
Hopefully, a sizable number of September 2020 applicants will attend their oath ceremonies in December this year.
PS : When IRCC doesn't do much, we complain. When it develops something new in response to our complains, we call it a PR stunt. This attitude is ridiculous. Of course, it is your right to have an opinion and I respect that but don't necessarily agree. Any movement on the positive side or towards betterment should be welcomed rather than condemned IMO.