Greetings Forum family. I shared with you that I sent an email to the Minister office on March 13 and I was advised that a reply was not guaranteed. Depending on the content of the email, that would determine if a reply is necessary from the Ministers office or not. Surprisingly, 4 days later we received ppr. Not only that, but I received a reply from the Ministers office today. Aside from our application, I mentioned the wait times at AVO, I mentioned how in comparison to other counties AVO stands at 16 months processing, which I am sure we can all relate with. I also mentioned the announcement on Dec 7 from the minister office and how we from AVO have yet to see any improvement from this 25 million dollar funding. I just wanted to share some excerpts of the email response from the IRCC minister office. Even though our file has reached ppr stage, the information provided is not irrelevant to us. I still wanted to share this with you all as we share the same journey, the same concerns, same questions and hopefully it can encourage some of you. Wishing everyone a positive result and praying you would be reunited with your loved ones soon :
"Thank you for your correspondence of March 13, 2017, addressed to the Honourable Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, concerning your spouse’s application for permanent residence under the Family Class (FC) Program"
"Please be assured that every effort is being made to finalize the applications of spouses and partners as quickly as possible. However, over the past few years, more people have applied to come to Canada in the spousal category than there was space for them in previous immigration levels plans, thus creating a backlog.
"As you are aware, the Department is working to reduce the spousal inventory. Targeted in-Canada inventory reduction efforts started on June 13, 2016. As a separate exercise, the overseas network has also received higher processing targets for spousal cases, which is helping to reduce overseas spousal inventories. An additional 12,000 - 14,000 spaces were allocated in the 2016 Immigration Levels Plan to spouses, partners and children. Budget 2016 provided $25 million in 2016-17 to support faster and more predictable processing times for family sponsorship. Through this investment, application backlogs will be reduced and wait times will be significantly shortened."
Information about the various stages of processing can be found at http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/information/applications/fc.asp.
While we realize that this situation is distressing to you, we trust that the information provided is of assistance.
