Good news - budget 2016 aims to reduce processing times

[methyl]

Budget 2016 was announced today with a funding increase of $25mln in 2016-2017 to reduce family sponsorship processing times. Also 20 million $ for expansion of settlement programs.

Reducing Application Processing Times
Family reunification is a key objective of immigration in Canada but too often it takes too long for family sponsorship decisions to be taken, leaving families separated for prolonged periods. To address this, Budget 2016 proposes to provide $25 million in 2016–17 to support faster and more predictable processing times for family sponsorship. The new funding will be used to target specific applications backlogs in Canada and overseas, and to reduce processing times on sponsorship decisions. Through this investment, application backlogs will be reduced and wait times will be significantly shortened.

budget.gc.ca/2016/docs/plan/ch6-en.html#_Toc446106826

To be realistic, $25m dropped into government offices probably will not do much, might add perhaps 100 case processing officers.

Targets for family sponsorship for spouses, partners and children are increasing from 45,000-48,000 to 60,000, so an additional 12000-15000 spouses/kids will be processed/year.

 

[deepax]

Specific application backlogs


I wonder if this will mean for specific visa offices only. And if yes, which ones?

 

[npcanada]

This is really positive to look at as I think this would speed up the process. If not significantly atleast the processing times would be shortened by a couple of months, as of now it is taking over 12 months.

 

[Ponga]

This is really positive to look at as I think this would speed up the process. If not significantly atleast the processing times would be shortened by a couple of months, as of now it is taking over 12 months.

And...28 months for Inland applicants.

 

[methyl]

I guess it will take months if not years to see any effect in reality