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IRCC Minister Sean Fraser

IRCC Minister Is Confident In Resolving Immigration Backlog!

IRCC is dealing with a huge pile of backlog. With recent available data, there were 2.4 million persons awaiting decision on their applications. Furthermore, this number might have increased, lately. IRCC Minister Sean Fraser says he can solve the IRCC problems, and he is very confident and optimistic about it.

Reasons For IRCC Backlog

As per IRCC minister, there are multiple factors that contributed to backlog. Major factors that he mentioned were:

  • Limited functioning of IRCC offices around the world during pandemic.
  • IRCC’s focus on processing new applications to resettle in-Canada people during the pandemic.
  • Further division of IRCC’s capacity for processing because of immediate response and prioritizing to the situation in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

So, these are the major factors that minister feels increased processing inventory. “All of that said, I can solve these problems. I am actually very confident and optimistic about where we will be in the medium term,” Minister said. 

Solution to backlog

As per minister, answer to backlog lies in three parts. And, these are resources, policy, and technology. Fraser said, “Resources get you part of the way there. But you also have to adopt policies that are going to help make life easier for people going through the system.” 

Additionally, minister said he is also working on improving IRCC system to align with the 21st Century tech. “It was stunning to me the degree to which Canada’s immigration system is paper based. We’re in the middle of the biggest digital transformation, certainly in Canada’s immigration system in our history, potentially across any government department in Canada’s history,” he said. 

He also said, “We’re not going to get through the number of people who are trying to come to Canada unless we make more space for them. That requires us not just to stick a number (immigration targets) on a page, but to work with the settlement sector to understand what the absorptive capacity of Canadian communities are to make sure that we have enough people working at IRCC to process those cases per year.”  



“If we go down the path that we have seen other countries pursue, where some people welcome newcomers and other people cast aspersions upon them, we will lose one of our greatest strengths because immigration is not something we do. It is who we are. Every Canadian who’s not Indigenous has a migrant story as their origin point in Canada. And if we forget that about ourselves, we will lose our greatest competitive advantage and that’s the ability to welcome talented people.”

IRCC Minister, Sean Fraser

Minister is good at diagnosing the problem and we believe he will be able to effectively and efficiently bring IRCC service standards back on track in medium term.


Source: The Hill Times