Last spring, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney introduced what he called “transformative” change to the Canadian immigration system.

In re-tooling the economic immigration class, the government wants to move to a just-in-time model of matching skilled workers directly with employers. But before that can happen, Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) needed to deal with a substantial backlog of files under the Federal Skilled Workers class, including applications from about 300,000 prospective immigrants dating back to 2004.

The government moved to eliminate this backlog with Bill C-38, the 2012 budget, which mandates the return of all applications still unprocessed from 2004 to the cutoff of February 27, 2008. It’s an unprecedented move that upset many prospective immigrants who had been waiting for years for their files to be processed. Not surprisingly, the matter is now before the courts on several grounds. To get a sense to what’s going on I sat down to speak to one of the lawyers challenging the legislation. Mario Bellissimo is a Toronto immigration lawyer with Bellissimo Law Group  and vice-chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s National Immigration Law Section. Here’s our conversation:

 

 

For more on the Federal Skilled Workers program and other big changes last year, the Maytree Foundation’s top ten list is a good place to start. This is the first of three conversations I'm having with immigration experts on the proposed changes. We'd really like your feedback on these conversations so we can get a sense of the issues that are most important to our viewers and follow-up with additional programming. Please tell us below what you think of the proposed reforms, how the government is handling them and what you think needs a more fulsome discussion.

 

If you'd like more detail on the changes, you can also watch an interview The Agenda did last spring with Kenney about the changes: 

Also last spring, we aired a roundtable discussion looking at Kenney's proposed transformation of Canadian immigration:

 

 

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