My Original Message which I emailed to Canadian High Commissioner, Ross Hyness in Islamabad and I got a response from Visa Section last month!
Dear Farakh Ejah,
Your recent email to High Commissioner Hynes was passed to the Visa section for response. We understand that these concerns have been addressed by the Minister's Office as reflected in your email. The Visa office in Pakistan strives to ensure that all applications are processed in a timely manner, and in accordance with the applicable legislation and regulations. I thank you for raising your concerns, and I wish to assure you that we are working diligently to improve the processing times in the office in Islamabad, which I acknowledge are longer than the average processing times for many other offices.
Regards,
Kate O'Brien
Immigration Program Manager
Canadian High Commission
PO Box 1024, Islamabad, Pakistan
My Origional Message
Dear Ross Hyness,
The reason I am writing this email to you is that, nowadays people have been suffering about the lengthy wait processing time for their spouses to immigrate to Canada from Pakistan. As you know that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has been claiming that family reunification is the first priority. It is also in the constitution that a Canadian permanent resident or Citizen of Canada can legally sponsor their spouses and these application will be processed ASAP. But this is not the case for Pakistani people, CHC-Islamabad is been taking 26 months to process spouse applications and the sad thing is they don't even look at your application within first 12 months and they leave your applications in their storage to get dirt for the next 12 months till they start first initial review of your applications in the meanwhile they loose some important documents and they come back to you after a year and ask to fill up some more forms which you have been already filled up. People are also complaining about that once their spouse visa applications are transferred from Mississauga to Canadian High Commission Islamabad they don't send applicants their Acknowledgement Letter you got to email them several times and start begging for your file no# from Islamabad and they approximately reply you with in 30 days of your first email. Canadians citizens have similar issues that CHC-Islamabad is not sincere with Pakistani people as oppose to other embassies in other counterpart countries.
People have sponsored their wives almost 10 to 12 months ago and they still do not know the status of their applications. Every time they send an inquiry request to CHC-Islamabad, They get a generic reply from the embassy that "Your application is currently in process and is in queue for initial review". After 10 to 12 months they have not touched their files and it is taking almost 26 months to get a spousal visa.
Minister Jason Kenney claims that the delay at CHC-Islamabad is due to some extra background checks (specially for Pakistani people) and he also claims that Visa officers are highly trained to find out whether the marriage is genuine or not by looking at the supporting documents.
On the other side Indian has identical culture and same tradition as Pakistan, their spouses coming to Canada within 6 months and same with chinese spouses coming to Canada within 5 months. If Chinese and Indian spouses can come to come to Canada within 6 months then Pakistani spouses can come to Canada within 6 months. We all know India and china has the highest rate of fraud marriages. But Government of Canada is not haunting them because they have good relationships with India and china and off course Canada has lots of Indians and Chinese MPS who would represent their people.
Terrorism is not only exist in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan it still exist in India, Asia in Europe and in North America. That would be a stupid reason that Pakistani spouses has to go more than twice under background checks.
The reality is hundreds of families have been suffering for this never ending delays and the most frustrating thing is CIC charges almost $1100 up front to process one application and their online status system shows that your files is "IN PROCESS" even after you have received your visa. There is no way to find out how long it will take to process these applications.
People have filed complaints to Immigration Minister and Prime Minister but their offices reply after 1 or 2 months and in that reply they say that we are already aware of the situation, your complain has been forwarded to the concerned departments.
Following is the link of CIC website and you can read that they claim to complete 80% of spousal applications within 12 months which also includes step 1 of the process which gets processed at Mississauga step 2 of the process which gets processed at Canadian Visa abroad.
These activities have happened in the past but we did not see any outcome because media was not involved. Therefore, I request you to please look into this matter and bring this issue forward and ask questions from the concerned authorities. Your help can make a huge difference in hundreds of peoples lives and they will be relieved form this waiting pain, if this is resolved soon enough.
Hope for a positive response and would appreciate your help...
Best Regards,
Farakh Ejaz (on behalf of all Pakistani Community in Canada)
