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Canada's Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, John McCallum, has stated that his department aims to speed up processing times for family class immigration, economic immigrants and refugee claimants by applying the lessons it learned from bringing 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada over recent months.
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Canadian Immigration Minister Says Department Will Apply Lessons to Reduce Processing Times
Canada's Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, John McCallum, has stated that his department aims to speed up processing times for family class immigration, economic immigrants and refugee claimants by applying the lessons it learned from bringing 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada over recent months. “We have to re-engineer our whole department in terms of the processes we follow, the speed at which we do it — and we can draw on the experience we’ve just had with the refugees,” said McCallum in a speech yesterday at the Metropolis Conference, an annual national conference on immigration issues in Toronto.With processing times that often stretch into two years or longer, McCallum described processing times under the Family Class of Canadian immigration as "a mess." Processing of sponsorship applications for parents and grandparents takes more than four years. “We want to reform our own economic immigrant processes,” added McCallum. The government plans to meet with provincial governments and will look into handing more control over the selection of economic migrants to the provinces through the Provincial Nominee Programs, he explained.