Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) continues to set the bar higher for immigration processing. IRCC has already processed 6.15M applications across the Permanent Resident, Temporary Resident, and Citizenship lines of business from January 1 to October 31, 2023, which is 52% higher than the output during the same period in 2022 (4.05M). IRCC expects to process over 7M applications by the end of 2023.
To meet the high demand, the Department has grown in recent years including hiring over 1,250 new employees for its operations/processing branches alone from April 1, 2022, to the end of fall 2022. As more processing efficiencies and innovations are being implemented though, the rate of hiring in key operational areas is slowing, with just over 800 new employees hired between January 1 to October 31, 2023.
Key Messages
The recruitment and onboarding of significant number of staff have been a key contributor to the Department’s success in achieving its historic levels and application volumes.
Over the years, immigration targets have grown to ambitious levels across all business lines, particularly permanent resident admissions. The Department’s Immigration Levels Plan for 2023-2025 reflects Canada’s commitment to welcome 465,000 new permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.
IRCC continues to pursue achieving its ambitious targets for permanent residents and maintaining a competitive environment to attract and retain temporary residents. This involves an ongoing commitment to improve client services and processes, and reduce application processing times as identified in the December 2021 Mandate Letter.
While the Department has grown to meet these increasing levels, IRCC is focused on various priority measures such as activity-based processing, centralization, automation and digital platform modernization (DPM) that are being developed to help better manage the workload where the capacity is, and reduce inventories without relying on continued growth as in recent years.
With the introduction of various efficiencies and innovations, IRCC is now better positioned to meet the continuing demands from its clients, stabilize its staffing base, and become more fiscally prudent. However, controlling intake in some high demand programs may also be necessary in order to ensure the long-term stability of its operations.
Supplementary Information
IRCC’s workforce has grown significantly over the past few years to meet ongoing processing and operational demands.
During 2022, the Department successfully met the Minister’s commitment (announced in August 2022) to hire up to 1,250 new employees by the end of fall 2022.
However, as processing efficiencies and innovations are gradually being implemented, the rate of hiring in key operational areas is slowing with just over 800 new employees hired during the period January 1 to October 31.
The Department is now looking to stabilize its human resources going forward as more sustainable solutions such as DPM are introduced in the medium to longer term.
The ongoing investment in IRCC’s DPM is expected to result in more comprehensive and sustained service and operational improvements, founded on new digital platforms that will bring more flexibility as well as system stability.
