Some people have mentioned about "AOR" here. Does it mean "Acknowledgement of Receipt"?
1. Yes, AOR means acknowledgment of receipt.
2. You will receive to your email. Note: I did not receive AOR and noticed that 50% of the applicants are not getting it. That doesn't mean your application was not submitted. It means IRCC's systems are bad.
Yes, AOR means "
Acknowledgement of Receipt," and its means the application has been opened and a file for it established in GCMS; thus the application has been determined to meet the requirements for making a
complete application, and it is being processed.
Note: Even though AOR means the application is in process, and this applies to many types of applications made to IRCC (not just PR card applications), "in process" very often means the application is sitting in a queue waiting for an official (officer or processing agent) to open the file to do the next scheduled task, not that anyone is actually working on the file/application. That said, unlike many other applications made to IRCC, a high percentage of PR card applications are more or less processed when opened and soon finalized. In contrast, for example, even though there is a file in GCMS and the application is considered to be in process following AOR, a citizenship application will typically then sit in a queue for months before there is any substantive processing beyond those tasks that are part of putting the file/application into process (such as the referral for clearances to RCMP and CSIS).
No AOR notice to many PR card applicants:
Cannot say what "
IRCC's systems are bad" means but that illuminates nothing.
Meanwhile, for
most PRs who are not inadmissible (thus, for example, not in breach of the Residency Obligation) who make a proper PR card application, their PR card application will be approved and a new card issued in less than half the time it was taking this time last year and less than one-fourth the time it was taking five years ago. (Reminder: "
most" is at least one more than half, which allows for a rather high percentage of applications to not be approved within IRCC's posted times; indeed, recently published stats indicate that overall more than 40% of applications made to IRCC are not processed within their "standards" let alone the currently published processing times.)
Most PR card applications are now benefitting from the automated approval process and are more or less approved without going through the AOR and in process procedure. In practical terms (we do not know the details in internal procedures) this means the application is approved automatically or when opened (the latter almost certainly based on some type of automated pre-approval), no need for AOR.
When there is AOR that probably means the application did not qualify for automated approval, so it is at least "
complex," and some of these will be "
high complex." Many (probably most) complex applications will still be more or less fully processed when opened or soon after being opened. IRCC does not publish a processing time for these applications but for now (processing times are highly variable and change over time) it appears the processing time for most of these applications is around two to three months, comparable to standard or typical processing times (in contrast to periods of unusually long processing times, such as that in the wake of Covid) before most applications were getting automated approval.
Summary: Most non-complex PR card applications will be approved (within four to five weeks, subject to change) and under current procedure will not get AOR. Complex and high complex applications should get AOR within 7 to 10 weeks (likewise subject to change), and most of these are likely to be complex (not high complex) and approved shortly after that. There is no typical processing times for high complex and complex applications that are not approved soon after opening; these can take from several months to a year.
