Good afternoon to you all.
I would like to thank you for the kind invitation. I am honoured to be here today to speak on behalf of the Catholic Refugee Sponsors' Council.
In the time I have today, I would like to talk about retention, immigration applications and lessons to learn with respect to the PSR program backlogs.
Immigration is one of the most important sectors of the Canadian economy. Immigrants are needed to keep our economy growing and keep the Canadian pension fund afloat. IRCC recently proposed immigration targets of 500,000 immigrants per year to achieve this growth. The immigration targets have been increasing over the years, and this increase influences the backlog levels. Immigration targets are directly related to the number of Canadians and permanent residents leaving Canada on an annual basis. The higher this number is, the lower the retention rate of the Canada immigration intake is. Studies have suggested that retention levels are as high as 50% of the immigration levels.
IRCC never discloses retention numbers, and we do not know how effective and efficient immigration policies are. Retentions are very important to audit, first, to optimize the effectiveness of IRCC programs, and second, to know which immigration stream is more efficient. Knowing which stream has higher retention would give government direction on where to direct immigration policies. Low retention rates lead directly to higher backlogs. IRCC is obligated to inflate the annual landing targets to 500,000 to cover the economic loss of about 200,000 immigrants or Canadians leaving Canada annually. If that many are leaving, what good are the rules and administrations? Optimizing immigration retentions is very important in order to have a successful and efficient immigration program and hence reduce the load on IRCC processing.
The other issue that could be affecting the backlogs is how many applications are being submitted annually by the immigration industry to IRCC. If application numbers are exceeding the immigration targets by large numbers, those backlogs will keep growing. This issue was a big problem in the private sponsorship program until 2010. The refugee sponsorship applications exceeded the refugee targets by multiple times. Sponsors were flooding the system with applications, and waiting times in some visa offices exceeded 10 years.
Back then, IRCC introduced the quota system for sponsorship agreement holders, SAHs, to limit the application intake and make it closer to the refugee intake. This forced SAHs to sponsor vulnerable refugees who passed the IRCC standards and ensured that the applications were completed properly. This could be a solution if IRCC is being flooded with applications far beyond the capacity of the intake target. Other solutions could be to have a moratorium on applications until the backlog is cleared or to follow other countries' practice of limiting how long the application would be in the backlog before closing the file and requiring a new application.
In some cases, backlogs are influenced by political interference, particularly in the case of refugee application backlogs. Political interference in the priorities of the selection process cause delays in the processing of vulnerable refugees around the world. For example, the recent prioritizing of Afghan and Ukrainian refugees limited the processing of refugees across the world.
Backlogs are troublesome to the sponsors because the sponsors do depend on volunteers. Those volunteers are involved with the refugees even before the application process. When those volunteers see that the process is taking too long, they lose interest and they're not interested in working on this. In many cases they're working with the refugee family, and after a couple of years the refugee family ends up accepting refugee status in Sweden, Australia or New Zealand and abandons their application and the whole effort of the refugee is lost.
Thank you very much.