F.P. Report
ISLAMABAD: The government of Canada has decided to considerably reduce the duration of processing time for visas of Pakistani nationals, on Friday.
Canada’s Minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Sean Fraser has announced that the visa processing time for Pakistani nationals has now been reduced from 802 days to just 60 days.
The Canadian minister promised that visa processing time would be further reduced to one month.
He said that now Pakistani citizens will be able to get a visa to Canada in 60 days instead of 802 days. “Currently, a complete TRV [Temporary Resident Visa] application from Pakistan will be processed in 60 days, and we expect to hit 30 days in the near future,” Sean Fraser tweeted.
Last year, Canada announced that it will boost its immigration targets, hoping to welcome a record number of newcomers in order to address a worker shortage in the country.
A large chunk of the population is heading into retirement, according to recently released census data, with one in seven people in Canada between the ages of 55 and 64 years old.
The website shows 802 days because the Canadian immigration ministry was processing older applications from when borders were closed due to the pandemic. “We’ve reduced the backlog for Pakistani TRVs significantly, from 55K [fifty-five thousand] to less than 15K [fifteen thousand],” said Fraser.
He added that the country was also investing in a new processing centre in Islamabad to boost “processing and interview capacity” in the Indo-Pac region.
In 2021, Canada welcomed over 405,000 immigrants, the most ever in a single year.
By 2025, the goal is for more than 60 percent of the total admissions are to be economic migrants, Fraser said last year. Canada also aims to reunite more families with members abroad faster, but take in slightly fewer refugees.
It may be mentioned here that last month Canadian High Commissioner to Pakistan Leslie Scanlon had assured Commerce Minister Syed Naveed Qamar that the Canadian government is working for further facilitation and speeding up the visa process for the Pakistani business community.
The envoy had called on the commerce minister to discuss ways to strengthen the trade ties between the two countries where the minister urged for facilitation in the issuance of visas to the business community for participation in exhibitions and other business events, especially for upcoming exhibitions in Canada like SIAL Canada, the largest food innovation trade show in North America.
The minister had also appreciated the upcoming Canadian General Preferential Tariff (GPT+) programme for developing countries and expressed hope that launching of GPT+ Program in Pakistan would be more beneficial to new proposed sectors such as apparel and footwear.
He hoped that Canada will also consider including more sectors of textiles in the proposed scheme. The minister also appreciated that Pakistani exports to Canada were higher than its imports, with a trade surplus in Pakistan’s favour.
