She gave birth 8 months ago but this permanent resident still can't bring her baby to Canada

It's been eight months since Anu Sehgal gave birth to her baby boy — but she's been waiting for Canada to let her bring him home ever since. 

The 39-year-old, a permanent resident who lives in Toronto, had her little boy in India last year, but despite following all the right processes, still hasn't been able to bring him home. 

Now, after multiple inquiries to the federal government with little word back, Sehgal wonders if moving to Canada was the right choice for her and her family.

"That was my main motive: to move here for a brighter future for [my] children," she told CBC News. "I never thought that it would become such a problem."

Sehgal received her permanent residency in 2019. She originally planned to immigrate to Canada in 2020, but then the pandemic hit.

Last year, another hitch: Sehgal contracted COVID-19 in India. Her doctors advised her to avoid travel, so she had baby there, further delaying her move.

She finally arrived in Canada this past March, leaving behind her baby and husband, who has yet to apply for residency in Canada. The hope was that by the time she arrived, her son's temporary residency application would be approved. 

It wasn't. Last month, she decided to file a permanent residency application for her baby, hoping to increase the chances of getting a response.

Immigration lawyers say Sehgal's applications should have been easy to expedite on compassionate grounds, but could have fallen through the cracks of a backlogged and inefficient immigration system that's been made worse by COVID-19. 

As of May, the IRCC states there are roughly 2.2 million citizenship, temporary and permanent residency applications waiting to be processed — about one million more than before the pandemic, according to the Canadian Immigration Lawyer Association (CILA).

"Why would you not issue the visitor visa in the interim so that the family can reunite?" said immigration lawyer Adrienne Smith, who works with Battista Smith Migration Law Group, based in Toronto. 

According to Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada's website, the average time to process a temporary visa application for someone from India is a little more than four months.

In an email to CBC News, IRCC spokesperson Nancy Caron says the ministry processes 80 per cent of family sponsorship permanent residency applications within 12 months, and welcomed more than 405,000 new permanent residents just last year. That's the highest annual number of newcomers in Canadian history, IRCC says.

But Smith says cases like Sehgal's can create a vicious cycle: the more applicants follow up and inquire about their applications, the longer it can take to get them processed because immigration officials need to address those follow-ups, splitting their time between answering inquiries and getting applications processed.