Canada announces plan to cap immigration limit for parents, grandparents

“Canada is the most generous country in the world with respect to immigration, but there have to be practical limits to our generosity,” Immigration Minister Jason Kenney noted as he revealed that the government plans to cut down an immigration backlog by capping the number of parents and grandparents of immigrants who can come to Canada.

The backlog is now more than a million names long, according to immigration officials.
Kenney suggested Canada might look at other countries’ immigration policies for ideas on how to limit applications. One method might be a minimum family income criteria.
Limiting the number of family sponsored applications would also help speed up processing times. “I don’t want people to waiting seven, eight or 10 years for their parents or grandparents to come. That’s cruel. That’s unfair.”
So, while Kenney agrees there is a need to increase participation in the workforce, Kenney said immigration is not the solution. He stressed that their government is not opposed to family reunification but there must be a limits.
“We have to calibrate those limits based on our country’s economic needs, our fiscal capacity. There is no doubt that the people who are coming who are senior citizens, they have much, much lower labour market participation and much higher level of utilization of the public of the public health system,” Kenney said.
“Those who think we can solve that problem through immigration alone are profoundly mistaken,” Kenney told the citizenship and immigration committee.
Lawyer El- Farouk Khaki called the plan “one more step in the Conservative agenda to close our borders.”
And NDP immigration critic Don Davies suggested in an October 14 letter to the Minister that Ottawa set a target of issuing 289,000 to 336,000 total permanent residency visas for 2012.
Davies said that Kenney’s direction is the wrong way to go.
“Capping applications is not the way to go,” he said. He wants Canada to accept another 100,000 immigrants each year, arguing a per capita dimension doesn’t make sense since the nation has so much more space.
Canada receives about 400,000 applicants for permanent residency every year. Since coming into power the Conservative government has granted permanent residency to an average of 254,000 a year. Last year, about 38,000 of those applications were from parents and grandparents of permanent residents.