Application sent in May 2020
AOR in November 2020
and that's it. Nothing moved for almost a whole year.
The application is for my parents (seniors), so no test required. I requested file notes at the end of July 2021 and still haven't received them despite following up three times already.
Based on the updates on the forum and the spreadsheets, it appears IRCC hasn't come up with a real mechanism to process applications. There's no indication they're following first come, first served or shortest job first or anything like that, it seems all over the place. There appears to be no strategy at all and it looks as if supervisors and leadership - who usually streamline these things - are completely missing in action. Extremely straightforward cases take just as much as many complicated ones. I can understand if refugee/some investor applications take a long time but vast majority of applications are economic class which tend to be clean applications.
Looking from our end at least, it paints a very disappointing picture of IRCC. 650 dollars is a pretty decent sum of money to find sufficient resources to process these applications efficiently. It's puzzling. They're talking about modernization etc but building a new case management system alone isn't going to solve this kind of inefficiency.