The new year is getting closer, and therefore the time of the entry of new rules for parents and grandparents’ sponsorship via Family Immigration Class. Evgeny Blumin, an immigration expert and vice president of Green Light Immigration, discusses the new rules and procedures.
According to the information received by our company from the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, acceptance of applications for parental sponsorship will begin in January of next year, and the selection process is likely to start in February. According to a recently published 2019-2021 Immigration Levels Plan, the Canadian government announced that it would accept 20,500 applications for sponsorship of parents or grandparents in 2019, and in 2020 and 2021 quotas will be 21,000 each, Blumin said.
Another major change in the process of parental sponsorship is the termination of the lottery system when selecting applications for parental sponsorship, Blumin stresses. Starting from January 2019, applications will be accepted in the “first come, first served” order. The first 20,500 full applications, supported by the appropriate package of documents, will have the opportunity to bring their relatives to Canada next year. The Canadian public has criticized this program a lot because, in fact, this program did not satisfy everyone, and because cybersecurity experts have repeatedly stated that the lottery system is vulnerable, making the possibility of manipulating the results very likely.
Another serious problem of the old system was the incompatibility of many applications with the program requirements. As a result, the second round of lottery selection was needed. For these reasons, the government decided to increase the annual quota and cancel the lottery.
Finally, the latest major change announced by the Minister of Immigration Ahmed Hussen will be the online application process. Previously, it was required to print out the entire package of documents and send it for consideration by mail or courier. However, it seems that the government is seeking to transfer the maximum number of immigration programs to electronic document management.
Regarding the basic documents that will be required for the application, Blumin said that the ministry explained that they would need the income statements of the applicants for 2016, 2017 and 2018. In order for your chances to bring your parents to Canada in the new year to be as high as possible – the best thing is to entrust the matter to professionals. Especially in the light of such significant changes in the procedure. Those who submit documents first will fall into the quota allocated by the government, while others will have to wait for their chance in 2020.
