Between October 10 and 23, 2023, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (“IRCC”) – Canada’s immigration authority – invited 24,200 interested potential sponsors to file an application under the Parents and Grandparents Program (“PGP”).
The PGP is a sponsorship program which allows a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, or a person registered in Canada as an “Indian” under the Indian Act, to sponsor their parents or grandparents for permanent residence in Canada.
The sponsor must file an Interest to Sponsor form and receive from IRCC an invitation to apply under the PGP. The PGP application is then two-fold: the sponsor submits a sponsorship application and the parents or grandparent submit an application for permanent residence.
The demand has been so high for the PGP that, since 2020, it has not been possible to file a new Interest to Sponsor form. As of November 3, 2020, the pool of interested potential sponsors totalled 203,213 Invitation to Sponsor forms. As such, in 2021 and 2022, IRCC only invited sponsors who had already filed this form in 2020 to complete an application. After the 2022 round of invitations, the pool was reduced to 132,213 candidates. IRCC has therefore continued to work through the backlog of interested potential sponsors by inviting a total of 24,200 candidates this October to complete an application under the PGP.
Until this is resolved, parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens and permanent residents can apply for a so-called “Super Visa”, valid for up to 10 years, which allows them to enter Canada multiple times for a maximum of 5 years at a time.
If you filed an Interest to Sponsor form in 2020 and have not received an invitation to apply for the PGP since then, make sure to check your emails regularly, including your spam and junk mail folders to find out if you are one of the lucky 24,200 people.
