Hi Annel,
I found this news below but I'm not sure if it's relevant to our current situation as pre 2008 applicants.
Based On Decision of Federal Court, Canada May Process Applications Made Prior To Feb 2008
Monday, 02 July 2012
Canadian Government has now conveyed that as per the decision of Federal court, Canada will process all the applications for permanent residency in Canada, accepted prior to February 27, 2008. The department of Immigration and Citizenship Canada is trying to finish up the pending lot of applications with the assistance of legislation.
Canada Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was sued by 900 Canadian permanent residency applicants under the federal skilled worker class out of about 300,000 affected applicants. The applicants pleaded the court to issues orders to get their applications for permanent residence be processed by Citizenship and Immigration Canada within a reasonable time frame. They asked the court to order the immigration department to process their applications within a reasonable time frame.
Around 300,000 applicants of central skilled worker class were affected by the non-processing of their applications of Canadian permanent residency and 900 applicants out of them had litigated the Canadian Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, Jason Kenney. The applicants filed the case in the Federal court to get the orders of processing their applications by the Canadian Immigration and Citizenship department within a realistic period of time. This is the result of the plea of applicants that Canadian government has issues orders to process the backlog of applications at the earliest.
According to Minister Kenney he is responsible for making policies concerning Canadian Citizenship and Immigration and the delay in processing the applications is merely due to changes in the policies, thus accepted. But litigants have their justified point of view that delay of 5-9 years is quite prolonged and can't be justified. Applicants argued that the department should be effective enough to process the application in time and they must possess the capacity to implement the new policies as soon as possible so that pending work doesn't hamper.
Although it has been communicated that Federal court has ordered the timely processing of all the pending applications, the practical problem is that backlog is huge. To tackle this problem, Federal court has also given a solution that process all the applications of the higher priority first till October 14, 2012 thus giving prospect to other candidates of process of their application with in time to come.
However, everything goes in favor of litigants, as according to their legal representative, the court has refused the appeal application filed by the Citizenship and Immigration Minister and gives the final verdict on this case.
As of late another Federal court also refused to offer any respite to the candidates who pleaded the court to order the Jason Kenney to safeguard their permanent residency applications while the case is in the court as the hearing was not complete yet and no law came into being at that time.
Whatever is the decision of the court is final now as the legislation had made the law after probing all the circumstances hence it's a blow to the Government of Canada and the department of Canadian Immigration and Citizenship because they were about to eliminate the applications of around 300,000 candidates from their records by returning back the processing charges.