Here’s something which may not much amuse Canada immigration-inspired people. According to certain fresh reports, the overall price of arriving in Canada–prior to becoming a citizen of the nation–is set to increase even as the recent federal budget hints that the administration is interested in fee hikes to accordingly manage the swelling charge of processing 100s of 1000s of petitions for citizenship & permits every year.
The incumbent administration is aiming to move more of those costs onto the companies/enterprises, which are keen to usher-in temporary overseas workers, besides those filing submissions for the Canadian citizenship. Simultaneously, Ottawa will spend extra money on both programs to increase the pace of the processing times, with $42 million allocated for the temporary resident program & $44 million for citizenship over 2 years.
Allegedly, a backlog in processing submissions for citizenship–besides a scarcity of citizenship judges & fresh counter-scam steps–have led to long delays of months, or even years, for individuals to get their prized citizenship status. According to recent data proffered by the Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC)–as of September 30, 2012–as many as 319,517 petitions for citizenship were waiting to be processed.
However, the organization had earlier pocketed just sufficient money to process close to 160,000 submissions per annum. At the present, those submitting petitions for citizenship pay nearly $200 even as the same is just close to 20% or one-fifth of the fee to process the submission.
In this connection, a concerned spokeswoman was quoted as saying that the most vital issue with citizenship processing times is that–while the real cost of processing the submissions for citizenship has headed north–the fee has not been swelled in almost two decades.
Meanwhile, the involved department is spending close to $35.5 million per annum to process the submissions filed from the recruiters/firms, to usher-in temporary manpower from abroad. Reportedly, at the present, no fee is charged either to the firm or the employee.
Further, the administration will also plan to bring-in user charges for the firms/recruiters filing petitions for the provisional temporary workers from abroad, via the process of the labour market opinion (LMO), so that common Canadian taxpayers are not burdened with the said costs anymore.
For the past 5 years, the program meant for the temporary foreign manpower has been growing quicker, as compared to the class of permanent economic residency. During the year gone by, there were over 213,000 overseas workers in the country, in comparison with more than 160,000 overseas people who turned-up through the Canadian federal skilled worker arrangement. The hurried development & growth of the scheme has raised fears that Canadian companies are filling job openings with cheaper manpower from abroad instead of vigorously locating the nationals for the given object.
