Madam Chair, honourable members, we would like to thank the committee for welcoming us today to hear our testimony on the delays involved in obtaining permanent residence in Quebec. Our aim is to draw your attention to the status of our applications.
My name is Armelle Mara, and I represent Où sont nos demandes de résidence permanente?, a group I formed together with Ms. Hatem. I am from Cameroon, and I came to Quebec as an international student in 2016. Although I filed my permanent residence application in 2018, I am still waiting and have not had a work permit since December 2018. I can assure you that many of us are in the same situation.
We are a group of permanent residence applicants who have been waiting for a decision since 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. We already have our Quebec acceptance certificates, an essential step in applying for permanent residence. Despite that fact, we are forced to wait 26 months—and, in fact, as many as 32 months—to become permanent residents.
Having had enough of waiting for months and, in some cases years, without any prospects, we decided to take clear, proactive steps to alert public authorities. There are 3,900 persons in our group, and we have started up a petition that has gathered nearly 11,000 signatures to date. We also demonstrated in Montreal and Quebec City on November 13 to draw attention to our cases.
We have come to this pass as a result of the total lack of response to our applications. File processing times have virtually doubled. COVID-19 and the advent of teleworking have contributed to the complications we have experienced in filing applications in paper format. We are immigrants, and we are definitely seeing red!
I'm going to hand over to Ms. Hatem.