Banana said:
Some thoughts regarding waiting time for different VOs.
Some time ago the former Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney twitted that 2013 FSWP applications will go to the back of the queue: https://twitter.com/kenneyjason/status/303391883483299843
It is obvious that there is a separate FSWP queue in each VO and the number of applications in queue (backlog) is different among various VOs.
The following document (from CIC) shows backlogs for different VOs as of April 9, 2013: http://www.cic.gc.ca/opendata-donneesouvertes/data/000023-eng.xls
If we look at the sheet "SW - Cases", we can see that the current backlog for New Delhi is 4,371 cases.
For Hong Kong it's just 56 cases - this small number could explain the fact that some applicants from HKVO have already received Medical Exam requests.
As far as I remember, some applicants from Beijing VO reported no Medical Exam requests so far, and this could be explained by the fact that Beijing has 981 cases in queue.
There is 1 more stat we can add, and by that, we can basically predict processing times. The stat is the number of persons quota for FSW for each VO this year:
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/ips/economic.asp
What is did is that I took cells for number of persons in queue for Selection Decision and for Final Decision from Banana's spreadsheet, for each VO, and then divided it by the yearly quota. This is what I got below, for the number of months a new FSW application will spend in queue before medical and visa. The total expected time in queue is the sum of the two columns. Of course this is just the queuing time, it does not contain the actual processing time by visa officer.
| Visa Office | Months in queue before Medical | Months in queue between Medical and Visa |
| Accra - RPC | 11 | 4 |
| Amman | 12 | 1 |
| Beirut | 0 | 0 |
| Cairo | 1 | 1 |
| Dakar | 2 | 4 |
| Nairobi | 1 | 7 |
| Pretoria | 1 | 7 |
| Tel Aviv | 6 | 4 |
| Beijing | 1 | 8 |
| Colombo | 0 | 0 |
| Hong Kong | 0 | 0 |
| Islamabad | 1 | 3 |
| Manila | 2 | 3 |
| New Delhi | 1 | 10 |
| Singapore - RPC | 6 | 8 |
| Sydney | 9 | 4 |
| Bucharest | 3 | 6 |
| Kiev | 5 | 6 |
| London - RPC | 2 | 14 |
| Moscow | 3 | 4 |
| Paris - RPC | 0 | 12 |
| Rome | 4 | 3 |
| Vienna - RPC | 5 | 12 |
| Warsaw | 0 | 21 |
| Bogota | 0 | 7 |
| Buenos Aires | 0 | 3 |
| Buffalo - RPC | 2 | 20 |
| Guatemala | 2 | 1 |
| Havana | 6 | 3 |
| Kingston | 6 | 12 |
| Lima | 12 | 4 |
| Mexico | 0 | 2 |
| Port of Spain | 15 | 142 |
| Port-au-Prince | 1 | 0 |
| Santiago | 12 | 0 |
| Santo Domingo | 8 | 0 |
| Sao Paulo | 3 | 6 |
If we really go to the end of the queue, these stats should be close to our stats in the FSW 2013 spreadsheet in the future. But I really hope we have a "special" queue, just because they promised less than a year to visa (sorry FSW 2011 and before applicants, nothing personal here...)
