Prime Minister Stephen Harper holds a soccer ball along with Bal Gosal, Minister of State (Sport), and athletes from the Women’s National Soccer Team, to show support for the FIFA Women’s World Cup soccer tournament which Canada will host in 2015.

To create a fast and flexible immigration system that creates jobs and promotes Canada’s long-term prosperity, the government is eliminating the backlog in the main federal economic immigration program. 

“The Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSW) backlog is a major road-block to Canada’s ability to respond to rapidly changing labour market needs,” said Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney. “Having to process applications that are as many as eight years out-of-date reduces our ability to focus on new applicants with skills and talents that our economy needs today.” 

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) is now in the process of refunding fees and returning stale applications from nearly all those applicants who applied under the dated criteria in existence before February 27, 2008. 

CIC is transforming its suite of economic immigration programs to create a just-in-time system that recruits people with the right skills to meet Canada’s labour market needs, fast tracks their immigration, and gets them working in a period of months, not years. Eliminating the long-standing backlog of FSW applications will allow the department to focus resources on facilitating the arrival of skilled immigrants who apply under the current eligibility criteria. 

Under proposed legislation, CIC will close the files of FSW applicants who applied before February 27, 2008, and for whom an immigration officer had not made a decision based on selection criteria by March 29, 2012. This is expected to affect around 280,000 applicants, including their dependants. CIC will begin the process of returning the full amount of fees paid to the department by these affected FSW applicants. For those who have passed the selection criteria stage – approximately 20,000 people – CIC will continue processing their applications until they are approved for entry into Canada or not. 

Over the last decade, the number of FSW applications received has greatly exceeded the space available within the immigration levels plan each year, resulting in long processing times and an increasing inventory. Under the 2008 Action Plan for Faster Immigration, CIC began to limit intake to priority occupations. The department added caps to the number of new applications in 2010. As a result of these efforts, CIC has reduced the pre-2008 backlog by more than 50 per cent, and the overall FSW inventory by over 25 per cent. However, without further action, some FSW applicants might have to wait until 2017 for a decision.