July 2026

On July 15^th, IRCC announced that it was indefinitely pausing the intake of new applications under the Parents and Grandparents (PGP) Program. Specifically, it noted that it would not ‘receive new interest to sponsor forms or invite potential sponsors to apply until further notice’. However, it will continue to process existing applications, with up to 15,000 individuals to be accepted through the program in 2026. No mention was made of what will happen after 2026, or what will become of the remainder of the 50,500 applications waiting to be processed.^[1]

 

The PGP program has operated on a lottery basis since 2017. However, no new interest-to-sponsor forms have been accepted since 2020. Instead, each year since then, IRCC has drawn applicants from forms submitted in 2020. Since over 200,000 individuals submitted interest-to-sponsor forms in 2020, IRCC could have continued to draw from this same pool of applicants for several years, without having to open the pool up to new applicants. At the end of 2025, about 54,000 expressions of interest-to-sponsor forms remained in the pool.

 

IRCC has another family sponsorship program, formally known as the ‘Other Relative’ program, but colloquially known within immigration law circles as the ‘Lonely Canadian’ program. It has this nickname because it can only be accessed by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident who has no family living in Canada. If the sponsor is single, has no children, and has no extended family who is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, then they can choose one family member to sponsor for permanent residence. However, there is a catch. They can’t have a family member they could otherwise sponsor. This includes a parent or grandparent. This means that anyone who had a living parent or grandparent, even though they couldn’t submit an interest-to-sponsor form, was shut out from sponsoring another family member, such as their brother or sister.

 

Similarly, individuals couldn’t use the Other Relative program to sponsor their parent or grandparent because, if they had a living parent or grandparent, they were excluded from using the program.  The regulation that establishes the program is challenging to read, but it is clear that a relative only qualifies if the sponsor does not have a parent or grandparent:

• 117 (1) A foreign national is a member of the family class if, with respect to a sponsor, the foreign national is
• (h) a relative of the sponsor, regardless of age, if the sponsor does not have a spouse, a common-law partner, a conjugal partner, a child, a mother or father, a relative who is a child of that mother or father, a relative who is a child of a child of that mother or father, a mother or father of that mother or father or a relative who is a child of the mother or father of that mother or father

If it seems unfair to you that the existence of a closed program can be used to shut someone out from eligibility for another program, you are not alone; a Board Member of the Immigration Appeal Division, Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada named M. Kingma agrees with you. M. Kingma was asked to hear the appeal (VC5-25829) by a Canadian woman who applied to sponsor her mother through the Other Relative program and was denied. In allowing the appeal, the Board Member made the following remarks:

• [20] In the unique circumstances of this case, exclusion of the Appellant's mother from the sponsorship opportunity created by paragraph 117(1)(h) of the Regulations is incongruous with legislative intent to give the lone Canadian an opportunity for family companionship. The intent to provide family companionship for the lone Canadian can co-exist with the procedural purpose of the Ministerial Instructions because access to an "other relative" is only allowed when the sponsor has no relatives with status in Canada or who may otherwise be sponsored…
• [21] It is not reasonable or in keeping with the intent of paragraph 117(1)(h) of the Regulations that a person with no relatives except one parent could not sponsor that parent as their other relative. Nor is it reasonable or in keeping with the intent of paragraph 117(1)(h) that a parent may not be selected as the one relative allowed under paragraph 117(1)(h) of the Regulations while a distant relative would be eligible.

Unfortunately, I am advised by the lawyer who represented the appellant that the Minister (representing IRCC) has just filed an appeal of the Immigration Appeal Division’s decision with the Federal Court. Though I am not surprised, I am disappointed.

 

For individuals wishing to use the Other Relative program but needing to ‘get around’ the fact that they have a living parent or grandparent, one option is to request humanitarian and compassionate considerations to overcome the legislative restriction. Section 25.1 of Canada’s immigration law allows officers to grant applicants an exemption from any applicable criteria of the legislation on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.  The fact that the parent and grandparent program is indefinitely paused, leaving the Canadian sponsor ‘indefinitely lonely’ in Canada, could be a compassionate ground to be advanced. It could be more tricky to advance this argument on behalf of parents and grandparents, however. Under the lottery system, it was specifically prohibited to use humanitarian and compassionate considerations to ‘get around’ the lottery selection process.^[2] Officers may be less open to the idea of parents and grandparents using humanitarian and compassionate considerations to fit into the Other Relative category, especially in light of what is now going to be a Federal Court case. They also may be less likely to consider humanitarian and compassionate considerations for elderly parents, in contrast to younger family members who would be more able to establish themselves in Canada through employment. Humanitarian and compassionate factors are very fact-specific, with each application being determined on a case-by-case basis.  

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^[1] I base this figure on the number of individuals noted as waiting for a decision on a submitted application, combining the numbers for those destined for inside and outside Quebec: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/application/check-processing-times.html

^[2] See, for example, the Ministerial Instructions for the 2025 lottery: Humanitarian and compassionate requests

A request made under subsection 25(1) of the Act from outside Canada and that accompanies an application that was not accepted for processing under these Instructions will not be processed.

https://gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/2025/2025-12-27/html/notice-avis-eng.html#ne1   

June 2026

 

Did you know that Niagara Falls is not Canada’s highest waterfall? It boasts the highest flow rate and is definitely the most famous, but the actual highest waterfall in Canada is in British Columbia. This past week, I had the pleasure of visiting Montmorency Falls, which is 30 metres higher than Niagara and the highest in Quebec. I climbed an impressive set of stairs from the bottom of the falls to a suspension bridge that spanned the top of the falls. It was quite the view.

The excursion was during a three-day mini-vacation to Quebec City. During that week, Canada’s Immigration Minister paused processing of citizenship by descent applications, the Ontario government announced Phase 1 of its Immigrant Program Redesign, and IRCC updated its program delivery instructions for Study Permits: Assessing study permit conditions. This meant, in addition to the 192 emails that came into my inbox while I was away, I had to come up to speed on these developments and more.

In the province of Quebec, there is a government-mandated two-week summer vacation for the province’s construction workers that begins the second-last Sunday of July. According to my research (which consisted of a quick visit to Wikipedia), ‘While initially created in 1971 to coordinate different building trades on large projects, it has grown into a widespread cultural tradition. Roughly a quarter of all workers in Quebec take their vacation at this time, resulting in a major peak for tourism, cottage rentals, and traffic across the province.’

I would like to propose a similar government-mandated two-week summer vacation for the Canadian and provincial immigration industry. There would be a decree prohibiting policy announcements from any level of government. Deportations would be suspended. The Federal Court would not hear any immigration-related matters. The Immigration and Refugee Protection Division would suspend proceedings.  Provincial and national law societies would not meet to plan conferences or draft policy statements to the government, and listserv postings would be prohibited. No one would post to X. All lawyers and other members of the immigration legal community would spend time with their families, pursue personal interests and find waterfalls.

I’ve not taken two consecutive weeks off during my career. How could I, when IRCC regularly sends out letters requesting that documents be provided within a 7-day deadline? Most immigration lawyers work as sole practitioners or in small firms. It’s not the type of job where you can take weeks off at a time and completely ‘unplug’. It is a job I love, but the constant onslaught of information is a challenge. My call for a mandated summer vacation is tongue-in-cheek, but short of retiring, it is probably the only way my colleagues and I will ever manage to get a true vacation.  

Happy Canada Day, everyone.

For years, immigration lawyers have been complaining of being shut out of IRCC’s online portal access for citizenship applications. Though unrepresented applicants can submit their applications online, lawyers are not permitted to use this particular portal. Instead, lawyers must courier citizenship applications to Sydney, Nova Scotia.  

Having to create paper copies for citizenship applications is particularly annoying because IRCC requires a colour photocopy of every page of each passport (current or expired) held in the last five years for each country of citizenship. This includes blank pages. So, if you are representing a client who holds citizenship in two countries and has an expired and a current passport for each of those countries, that’s four passports, and every single page of each of those four passports needs to be copied, even if the page is completely blank. That’s a lot of pages.  

Canada no longer routinely stamps passports for travellers entering Canada. Passports are scanned, and information is recorded electronically and entered into a database. Other countries do the same. Very few countries stamp passports for travellers leaving the country. We often see clients with extensive travel histories who don’t have a single stamp in their passports.    

When applying for citizenship, applicants must show that they have met the physical presence requirement: they must have been in Canada for 1,095 days in the previous five years, unless working abroad as a crown servant or accompanying a family member who is working abroad as a crown servant. However, it is possible that in the future, IRCC will no longer need to rely on passport stamps to verify physical presence in Canada. Digital entry/exit records will theoretically be available for a full five years by November 2027. 

IRCC’s Entry/Exit Program states that data collection for land entries between Canada and the USA began on July 11, 2019, with air mode starting on June 25, 2020. It took time to fully onboard all of the airlines, but this was expected to be completed by November 2022. Marine and train travel are also mentioned briefly, but no dates were given.  

It is my hope that once a full five years of data is available for all modes of travel, IRCC will do away with the requirement to provide all pages of a passport for citizenship applications. Similarly, for permanent residence applications, there are onerous requirements to provide proof of residency in Canada. I am hopeful that applicants will no longer have to provide copies of their rental agreements, bank statements, pay stubs, and club memberships to prove they have been living here, because the government of Canada’s own entry/exit records will be sufficient to demonstrate they have been in the country.   

The Entry/Exit Program was in the news recently, and got the Immigration Minister into some hot water. As stated on the IRCC website, at the link noted above, the program has many uses, in addition to verifying physical presence for citizenship and permanent residence renewal applications. ‘Overstay’ data is also available in GCMS notes (accessible to IRCC and CBSA officers), indicating when someone had stayed longer than permitted by their visitor, worker, or student status. The program also notes that once fully implemented, CBSA officers would be able to use the data to determine if someone already in the country has stayed longer than they were authorized (and should be deported).  

As reported in the Globe and Mail, a pilot program will be implemented to track the exits of some temporary residents, including international students. The pilot program comes on the heels of an Auditor-General report critical of the Immigration department’s failure to investigate cases of student permit non-compliance and fraud.   

However, as scathingly pointed out on X, the Entry/Exit program already made accessible information on overstays and gave the authority to investigate individuals potentially overstaying (who were still in Canada): 

April 2026

I have a client whom I will call John. Of course, his name is not John, because if his name were John, and not Vineet, Hassan, Abdul or any other name that wasn’t like John, I wouldn’t need to be writing about him.

John came to Canada as an international student when international students thought they could come to Canada, study hard, get their degree, get a post-graduation work permit, get a job, work hard at their job, apply for permanent residence, be approved, and a few years later, get a Canadian passport.