Immigration department has new minister but old problems of delays continue

Canada's new immigration minister is inheriting a backed-up system, with many families separated and refugees stranded overseas.

Marc Miller, the country's fifth minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) in almost eight years of the Liberal government, sat down for his first TV interview last week with CBC News to discuss the ongoing problems.

He said refugee applications should be processed quickly and the system needs modernization.

"It's fair to say, in some respects, the way we do the actual day-to-day operations of immigration and refugee and citizenship applications has not adapted to the 21st century," he said.

"If there is probably one regret we can formulate going back to 2015, is some of those system changes where systems are archaic going back to the 1960s … investments probably should have been made at the outset."

Miller said there is an ongoing influx of demand on the system, and some difficult choices would have to be made to address the backlog. He said the department has doubled its capacity to deal with individual files in the past year, but there is a still a lot of work to be done.

"The need of people to access their files and, over the last year, we've been trying to tweak that. We are not there yet," he said.

For Abdulsalam Abo Alshamat, who works in Regina to resettle newcomers, the backlog has meant a one-year wait to bring his mother to Canada has turned into nearly two years, and counting.

Alshamat and his family fled the violence in Syria, getting to Malaysia where they were refugees for nine years before making their way to Canada in 2021. However, due to health reasons, his mother was in Turkey when they resettled.

His family applied under the one-year window of opportunity program to bring his mother to Canada, but they are still waiting.

"We don't know how much longer it would take. I check the government website. I check with MPs, immigration lawyers, but nobody can tell you what's the maximum it can take. There's no time frame."

Alshamat's 69-year-old father applied for a Canadian travel document in July 2022 to visit his wife. The processing time was supposed to be the same as for a passport, 20 days, but it has been a year.

In March, they applied again, after seeing that newer applications are being addressed first.

"It's a tiring process just to apply for it, but waiting endlessly without any way of tracking is really stressful. It makes us stay in a state of anxiety and uncertainty," Alshamat said.