A shocking scandal! The Canadian Immigration Department has used ghost officials to suppress tens of thousands of applications, causing applicants to collapse

According to a CBC investigation, over the years, the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has assigned tens of thousands of immigration applications to deactivated official IDs, effectively using former employee codes to occupy space in the system. The survey shows that nearly 60000 applications have been assigned to these discontinued IDs, some of which employees have not processed documents for over a decade.

At first, the immigration department denied any mishandling of the application. At the time, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser firmly refuted these allegations, stating that they were "completely fabricated" and insisting that no application documents were ignored. However, internal emails obtained by CBC showed that after the issue was exposed, IRCC staff were instructed to conduct a review and reassign the application documents to current officials.

For example, the Immigration Department's office in Windsor, Ontario found that an unprocessed citizenship application was "assigned to a former employee" in early 2022. The email stated, "This application has been reassigned to the current secondary decision-maker

The immigration team in Hamilton and Niagara stated that an unresolved case has been assigned to a current official

In another office, the staff "reviewed and corrected" the documents. They wrote, "All files assigned to inactive IDs have been reviewed and reassigned. We will process and correct them in the coming weeks

The staff also discovered some issues, with some applications appearing to have been cancelled but "not properly closed" or incorrectly assigned.

A senior consultant questioned why the documents were "still left" in the office in Sydney, Nova Scotia, but were assigned to employees from other teams.

Another employee asked, "How should we handle these IDs

They also discovered several 'ghost' applications. According to rapid sampling, I believe many of these applications are 'ghost applications' that have been put on hold, but I wonder if it is possible to review these applications to ensure that no application documents have been lost for any reason

Internal emails also revealed concerns from the immigration department about system efficiency, with some employees questioning why they are still using code from old employees. After CBC's report, the immigration department began using a universal ID from April to May 2023 to ensure that applications are properly managed and not forgotten.

Meanwhile, a permanent resident applicant interviewed stated that she obtained permanent resident status just four months after the CBC report was released.