Ongoing immigration delays leave Calgarian waiting 5 years to reunite with parents

The first thing Vikramjit Brar does every morning is check his phone, hoping for good news from Canada's immigration department — that he'll finally be able to reunite with his aging parents for good.

Tens of thousands of kilometres away in Punjab, India, his parents do the same thing.

But after five disappointing years and growing, the family is losing hope.

Brar, a longtime Calgary resident who recently moved to nearby Airdrie, applied to sponsor his parents for permanent residency in 2018. He says it's been three years since he's seen any progress made on their application.

"We want to take care of them. We want them to be part of our lives," said Brar, who has lived in Canada for more than 15 years.

"They're stressed out, we're stressed out and there's no outcome. Nobody's even hearing our story.… They're not even looking at us."

Desperate for answers, Brar says he's been in touch with multiple immigration consultants, and he regularly sends web forms to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) but rarely receives a response. Recently, he's been able to get updates only when his local MP reaches out on his behalf, he says.

"The last three years, the answer they have been giving me is that the file is in the background check [process]," said Brar.

From 2015 to 2018, his parents were in Canada on a super visa, but Brar says an extension was denied. He reapplied for them in 2021 but again did not hear back from IRCC, he says.

The 34-year-old says he's put his life on hold. He and his wife are waiting until his parents have arrived to have a bab. But at this point, he doesn't know when that will be.

He's not alone. According to the latest data from the IRCC, more than two million immigration applications are waiting to be processed, including:

Of all those applications, 809,000 are backlogged — including 51 per cent of permanent residence applications.

IRCC did not provide specific data for the parents and grandparents program that Brar applied under, but immigration lawyers say this is an increasingly common story and something needs to change if the federal government intends to continue welcoming immigrants to Canada.

Jatin Shory, an immigration and refugee lawyer at Shory Law in Calgary, says a five-year wait is unreasonable.