Finley hopeful of decreasing the current immigration backlog

Immigration Minister Diane Finley said last week that the impact that a potential skilled immigrant can have on a particular community will be among one of the main factors for deciding the applicants who are to be allowed to move into Canada first.

Immigration Minister Diane Finley said last week that the impact that a potential skilled immigrant can have on a particular community will be among one of the main factors for deciding the applicants who are to be allowed to move into Canada first.

The minister also declared that the huge backlog of immigration applications is finally under control. She said that the backlog will start declining very soon because its growth has been capped by the government, much needed resources have been added and soon the priority applicants will be pinned down as well. However she did not disclosed that which type applicants will be given priority and said that it will be known only after she will give her first set of instructions to the visa officers.

It should be noted that all the applications that don’t match her instructions will be rejected or kept aside. Ms. Finley has pledged regarding the transparency of the process as the instructions will be published in the Canada Gazette and the immigration department’s website.

It is expected that the type of workers that will be prioritized will depend upon the information gathered over the past month of cross-country consultations that were held with more than 200 stakeholders. Finally, Ms Finley opened the floor to a question and answer session with all the participants in a national round table conference that was held in Ottawa last Friday. Of all the sessions to determine the priorities, this was the only session that Minister Finley attended.

After the meeting Minister Finley said that people in the meeting were quite frank and this proved to be helpful in identifying some issues that they wanted to explore further. Although Minister Finley did not speak on the types of skills she will focus on but she said that these consultations revealed “common threads” in labour shortages in Canada. She said that almost all regions are facing shortages in their medical, financial and IT sectors. She also said that the universities and the colleges across the country aren’t graduating enough people to fill the shortages and this trend has been observed even more in recent years.

Meanwhile, the MPs of the opposition are critical of the proceedings and after the process was wrapped up in Ottawa by Minister Finley, Liberal Immigration critic Maurizio Bevilacqua said that the process is flawed and completely backwards. Mr. Bevilacqua is planning to introduce an alternative immigration policy as part of the Liberal election policy.