Ottawa pitched extending refugee sponsor pause to late 2028 to fix backlog: records

OTTAWA — The federal department of immigration last year, suggested freezing most private refugee sponsorship applications until 2028 to clear backlogs in the system, documents obtained by The Canadian Press show.

Refugee advocates were caught off-guard last November when the federal government paused approvals of refugee resettlement applications filed by community organizations or groups of five individuals looking to bring refugees from abroad to Canada.

It froze acceptance of any new sponsorship applications, a freeze that was to remain in place until the end of 2025. It also reduced the quota for new applications from sponsorship agreement holders — charities and other groups that accept partial legal responsibility for refugees and train volunteers to welcome them.

The memorandum that enacted that decision, obtained by The Canadian Press through the access-to-information law, shows the department had suggested the application freeze needed to be in place much longer to get the number of applications in the system to a manageable level.

If acceptance of applications “remains closed for the next four years, a working inventory (e.g., sufficient applications to maintain 18-month processing times) would not be reached until at least December 2028,” the document reads.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has not yet said whether the freeze on applications will still be lifted at the end of this year, or be extended.

Isabelle Dubois, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, said in an email that the department can’t comment on future policy decisions.

Dubois said the IRCC is working to reduce application backlogs and build a stronger immigration system, and continues to welcome privately sponsored refugees based on the number of private sponsorship spaces available in the government’s immigration levels plan.

She said due to ongoing high demand, applications from private sponsors have continued to exceed available spaces available under the plan, which has resulted in a “large and growing” application inventory and lengthy processing times.

Dubois said the IRCC paused accepting new private sponsorship applications for groups of five and community sponsors as of November 2024 “to move toward providing more timely protection to refugees abroad and more certainty to sponsors in Canada.”

“This pause was to prevent further growth in the application inventory, with the goal of achieving more predictable processing times,” Dubois said. “It is important to note that the pause does not impact the number of privately sponsored refugees who can arrive in Canada each year.”

The Canadian Council for Refugees says it urged Diab in a meeting last month to resume taking applications, even under a limited cap, instead of extending the freeze that suddenly came down last fall.

“The impact was devastating, both for those who were waiting to be sponsored and those who are waiting to sponsor them, but very surprising and concerning more broadly among Canadians,” said Gauri Sreenivasan, one of the council’s two executive directors.

“We are actually renowned around the world for the private sponsorship program, and many countries look to Canada for the model of how to grow this kind of person-to-person connection and community-to-community connection.”

Sreenivasan said groups are already preparing applications to file in the new year. She said they have been left “without a signal” on what Ottawa will put in its annual immigration targets, usually released in late October or early November.

She said her fear is that volunteers and community groups will lose the habit of sponsoring a family or individual every few years if the program remains dormant.

“The longer that you keep that program frozen, you extinguish hope, not just for the refugees,” she said. “You disappoint and you demotivate a network of people in Canada who have actively committed to do this work.”

The council says it also has heard through its network of groups that the backlog has not been drastically reduced since last fall, when internal records showed a backlog of roughly 100,000 refugees awaiting processing of private sponsorship applications. At the time, that meant each application was taking 39 months to process.

The Carney government has committed to lowering immigration overall, citing pressures on public services and housing that it has largely linked to temporary residents such as foreign students — not refugees. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is cutting back staff as Ottawa limits both spending and the intake of various programs.

Sreenivasan’s group is anxious to see if this year’s immigration targets will make further cuts to refugee quotas.

Her council has asked the government to boost the current 9 per cent of immigration dedicated to humanitarian resettlement to 15 per cent, given the historic number of people now displaced globally.

“Instead of Canada stepping forward at a time of rising global need with the strong capacity that we have, we’ve been very concerned to see Canada stepping back, and not really reflecting the level of support there is in Canada for refugee welcome,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2025.