It is not the first-come first-serve paper-based system any more. Starting from January 3, 2017 through to February 2, 2017, Canadian citizens and permanent residents who want to apply to sponsor their parents and grandparents must first complete an online form on the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) website to express their interests in such an application. If they receive an invitation to apply, they will have 90 days to submit their complete application online to IRCC.
According to IRCC news, the initial interests-express form is extremely simple. It will only ask for the sponsor’s name, date of birth, country of birth, home address, postal code and email address. No duplicate entries will be allowed. What is interesting is that at the end of the 30 days, IRCC will randomly choose 10,000 people and ask them to complete the full application. It is a lottery! Is it going to be no preference at all? How random will it be? Will it have anything to do with the individual’s age, address and country of origin? I guess these questions can only be answered much later when the statistics come out.
The online form will be available on IRCC’s website on January 3, 2017. However, the new guide and application kit will only be available on January 9, 2017. The unlucky sponsors who are not selected will have to wait for the next year to bid again.
Couriers will lose their annual revenue on this sponsorship application delivery business. But it may open doors for many truly eligible sponsors.
Get help sponsoring your parents or grandparents from Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant Mary Zhang. Max Can Immigration is located in Markham, Ontario Canada.