Options for sponsoring family members to immigrate to Canada have dwindled considerably in recent years. Currently, you can still – in most cases – sponsor spouses and minor children to immigrate to Canada, provided you are a permanent resident of Canada or a Canadian citizen. But in most cases you cannot sponsor siblings, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and other relatives.
Worse than that, for the next two years, the Canadian Government has closed the door on new parental sponsorship applications. If you have an existing parental sponsorship application already being processed by the government, you can expect to wait five to ten years for an approval, assuming you obtain an approval. Parents can still be denied entry for health reasons, so an otherwise successful application can be rejected at the last minute due to some illness associated with old age.
The Canadian Government has announced that special visas will now be available for parents and grandparents applying through the parental sponsorship program. These special visas, however, will only be available to those who can obtain private health insurance. For people with pre-existing health conditions, the cost of such insurance may be so high as to effectively close the door on their chances of entering Canada.
It seemed like a Golden Age of family sponsorship not so long ago. As recently as 2010, the Alberta Government had its own program that allowed family members even to sponsor relatives such as siblings, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews. Now that program is long gone, perhaps never to return.
Nova Scotia has a family business sponsorship program in which existing Nova Scotia businesses can sponsor family members to come and work. However, though Nova Scotia is in many respects a wonderful place to live, it isn’t exactly an economic powerhouse. Few people would invest the time and money required to move to Nova Scotia and spend years to establish a business just so that a family member could be sponsored.
If family members have enough money, they can sometimes establish a business in a province such as BC, Manitoba, or New Brunswick, to name a few. The family members can then potentially obtain permanent residency as business immigrants under various provincial immigration programs.
If your family members are young, it may be worthwhile to have them come and study in Canada. If an international student completes a degree or certificate program, that person is usually eligible to obtain a flexible work permit immediately following completion of the program. And if a family member studies in Canada, that person may later qualify as an immigrant under a program designed for skilled workers or people with Canadian education and work experience.
However, for the sick and the elderly, it may be virtually impossible to obtain permanent residency unless they happen to be extremely wealthy, with a liquid net worth of at least a few million dollars being the minimum requirement. Even then, the Canadian Government currently takes only five hundred passive investor immigrants each year. In July of 2011, on the first day to apply for the investor program, almost 1,500 investor applications were received by the federal government, with most of them coming from China.
As a last resort, there is a program that allows people to apply for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. This program is often used for family reunification purposes or when the applicant doesn’t quite qualify as a refugee, but has undergone severe hardship in his or her country of origin. Applications under this program have a very low success rate, and I would be extremely hesitant to recommend such an application except in the rarest of circumstances.
Of course, immigration policy can change at a moment’s notice and that the lack of opportunities that currently exist for family sponsorship, in particular parental sponsorship, may give way to a wealth of opportunities in the future. However, the current majority Conservative government has made it consistently clear that government policy going forward will be to favour economic immigrants over family immigrants. Immigration that is perceived as being a drain on the Canadian economy, or on Canadian taxpayers, such as immigration through the sponsorship of parents and grandparents, is likely to be reduced over the coming years. The Conservative government has also taken steps to impede the success of refugee claims, and this too can be seen as being consistent with government policy to promote economic immigration and discourage immigration that may be perceived as being a burden on taxpayers.
So if you want to sponsor family members, look at other less direct options, such as immigration through Canadian education and work experience. And for sponsoring parents and grandparents, be prepared to get your application in early in November of 2013.
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