Oh God, it will drive me literally insane now ..if the timeline increased to 30 months.
There is no reason for this delay that they can justify themselves with. There are very few cases that are being filed from Pakistan under spousal category (first priority for family reunification). This used to take 6 months only a couple years ago.
I keep hearing MP lawyers, etc justifying the delay with, too many fraud cases from Pakistan, high volume of cases being filed from CHC ISB Visa Office, political instability in Pakistan.
If they reason that its the number of frauds that is delaying then even that doesn't make sense because highest on their fraud list is china or India etc yet their timelines are not 20+ months for those countries.
Volume of cases is also 1500 hundred (81% rate of approval) Spouse Sponsorship vs 4 thousand(rate of approval 84%) at India and 3 thousand from china (Rate of approval 62%) over last 12 months according to data.gc.ca . So certainly volume is not half as much as these other two countries yet our timeline is the one that keeps going up. As for extra workload from Afghanistan that excuse will not work either, as workload was shifted to London Visa Office for Economic classes and only refugee student and family class workload is on Islamabad.
Last but not least CHC saying its Pakistan's politics instability doesn't fly either because its always been this way at Pakistan and things at CHC ISB slowed down only a couple years ago after conservatives. Before that the timelines used to be something like 6-8 months. We had background checks back then too and even after the embassy having switched the agency the timeline is not going down.
How come no one tells us about about perhapes shortage of staff at Islamabad? Or limited # of visa quotas assigned to Pakistan?