A few months ago, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) sent notices to about 147 employees to be sacked at the case processing centre. About 84 temporary employees and 63 casual workers catering to the process the immigration applications and permanent residency cards were terminated.

This month, CIC is intending to fill about 160 vacant positions. The finances catering to this funding has been apportioned for the employees to be working at the citizenship operations, centralized intake office and the permanent resident card centre in Sydney. Most of the laid off employees would now be reinstated with permanent positions.

According to the Spokesperson for CIC, Karen Shadd, the main purpose is to speed up the processing timelines as well as to cut down on the inventories at the permanent resident card centre as well as in the citizenship operations. This is also expected to cater to execution of new ministerial instructions.

Mark Eyking, the MP from Sydney-Victoria has credited the return of jobs for these sacked employees to the testimony to the Citizenship and Immigration Committee in the House of Commons. This testimony was submitted in April from the people who were concerned with the influence these lost positions would have. The committee included MPs from various political stripes. The witnesses argued on the hiring process, layoffs as well as rehiring only to add to the claims of backlog.

As and when the backlog tends to build up, the CIC bring in workers on a temporary basis to clear this backlog. As per Eyking, such a process is not good for employees as they would not be having continuous employment which results in the delay of processing.

Above all, each year, there are about 300,000 applicants with hopes of coming to Canada. And so, more efficient measures have to be taken in order to ensure that timely processing is done for these applications.