IRCC clearing piled-up Express Entry cases before inviting FSWP and CEC candidates

As per the recent IRCC reports, the department is looking forward to reducing the accumulated Express Entry cases before proceeding further with CEC and FSWP class applicants. Therefore, for the time being, IRCC has put a hold on the invitations under the FSWP and CEC categories. Here are some of the important insights about Canada's Express Entry Operations, as obtained by the CIC Times through several documents and internal sources.

As per the references, IRCC (Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada) ceased issuing Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) invitations in December 2020 to pursue a strategy of aggressively inviting Canadian Experience Class (CEC) candidates and candidates under the Temporary Resident to Permanent Resident (TR2PR) pathway to support its 2021 immigration targets. According to some of the documents, this strategy resulted in considerable inventory expansion, a backlog of applications, and processing times that exceeded the service criteria for all economic categories.

According to recent reports, the total backlog in terms of the number of cases has increased from 1.5 million applications in the month of July, 2021 to near about 1.8 million applications as of October 2021. It includes cases for PR (Permanent residents), TR (Temporary residents), and Canadian Citizenship. As of October 27th, 2021, there were nearly 1 lac Express Entry PR cases awaiting processing. So, it seems to be a piling up of cases over a long period of time.

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Although, there were some reversals as well from this trend which is evident from the fact that there was a backlog of around 108,500 cases as of September 3rd, 2021. This implies that the Express Entry backlog was reduced by around 8,500 applications between September 3rd and October 27th of this year.

However, if compared at the same stage for last year, i.e., in September 2020, the EE backlogs were nearly 62,450 cases, which indicates that this piling up has almost doubled for Canada PR cases. Moreover, this issue may further escalate with the Afghanistan resettlement targets by the Canadian government.

In a recent statement issued by the IRCC, to meet its Express Entry processing criteria of six months or fewer, it will need to reduce the Express Entry backlog by more than half.

The IRCC manages applications for the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP), the Canadian Experience Class (CEC), and the Federal Skilled Trades Program through the Express Entry system (FSTP). Express Entry is the primary method through which Canada welcomes economic immigrants.

Candidates who meet the eligibility requirements for any of the three programs can create profiles on the IRCC website. These candidates are then assigned scores (commonly known as CRS Scores) based on age, education, language skills, and job experience.