rubberduckofdeath

And new initiatives like the one mentioned here will only help to slow the FSW queue...

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/departm...011-11-02a.asp

"Retaining international PhD students will also be easier, thanks to a new initiative announced today by Minister of State (Science and Technology) Gary Goodyear. Minister Goodyear joined Minister Kenney to announce that foreign nationals studying at a doctoral level in Canada, as well as recent graduates of a Canadian PhD program, will soon be able to apply as Federal Skilled Workers. "

helcat12

But we are also post June applicants
Category 2 and submitted in early September.

So if Post June 2010 are getting priority, why are we still waiting?

Pakistan applicants seem to fly through recently, confirming the suggestion that there is a team working exclusively on these applications at London.

That is unfair and discriminatory.

Mac2

I see what you mean! - that seems very unfair.

helcat12

It seems to me that one of two situations exists;

1) London VO is hugely disorganised and they cannot manage their workload efficiently to deliver the processing times and the processing of individual applications is almost entirely scattergun.
This results in a huge range of processing times across different applications and makes the average a meaningless number which bears no relation to how long an applicant might have to wait.

In terms of planning for emigration and assessing one's personal circumstances in relation to emigration, this is worse than useless, as PPR might come either much sooner or much later than an applicant has planned for.
For some, this will mean that by the time they get PR, they have moved on and no longer wish to emigrate.

2) they are working to some hidden agenda dictated by CIO and are choosing which applications to process based on criteria which we are not party to.


It could be a combination of the two, though.

In any case it is pointless to look at the data as an average of such widely varying timelines is meaningless.

christmasoompa

Or, it could just be that you are reading way too much in to the processing time of your application, and that it's due to something as simple as you having the same name as a suspected terrorist which would mean your background checks take much longer.

helcat12

Knowing my surname and how rare it is, I think that is HIGHLY unlikely!

surroundsaund

Well that's it for me. Looks like it may be time to call it a day for me.

Applied in Sept 07 through Abrams and Krochak. Fairly uneventful getting the papers and the like through. Then the wait started. And it went on and on and on. Over 4 years later and several futile attempts to accelerate my application and I’m still in purgatory.

The wife and I gave up waiting and started family planning (got a little one and are planning for one more). We’ve been saving and have been extremely diligent about expenses for when (if??) we move (no holiday in 4 years).

The town where we live is slowly being infested by less than likeable folks and we’ve been deliberating moving (within UK) but then we question the expense. If we move within the UK, we’re going to forget about Canada. I’m finding it hard to justify having to go through the sheer effort of moving house in the UK and then having to do it again – to another country no less.

I expect the processing times won’t improve, I’m at the end of my tether, got a nice pot of money saved up and could happily find a nice home without putting the family through a ‘what could be’

Really disappointed in the with the whole process, gutted to have shelled out and paid A&K, such a shame they have a bunch of muppets running the application process in London.

Sorry – I just had to get that out of my system.

christmasoompa

OK, then, maybe it's your brother-in-law with a similar name as a terrorist, that the employer one person worked for 9 years ago was linked to something dodgy, or that one of their references is suspected of being fraudulent so needs to be followed up on, or.......etc, etc. Things like that are what make Person A's application take so much longer than Person B's, even if the general public think they should be processed at exactly the same speed.

Point is that there is no 'secret agenda', and it really can be something as simple as background checks that can take a year that will delay an application. No rhyme or reason for it, but you are right that nobody can compare their own timeline to somebody else's.

Moondoggy

To be fair though I think most of the time it is due to backlogs and working through a set amount of work in a day...

For example a TWP application is stated as taking 8-10 weeks via the CIC in London, I bet 6 weeks of that time it is spent in a queue or at the bottom of the pile and the other 2+ weeks is 'actual' processing time and the amount of time an immigration worker is actively looking at and working on your file is much less... maybe 1 working man day or something stupid like that...

I doubt there is actually much physical work that goes into some applications, its just a case of waiting to hear back from checks, waiting on documents, collating all the data and then doing the final bit of paperwork...

surroundsaund

I totally agree with you Moondoggy and that's the reason its all a mess.

4 years is quite enough and it would be good to take advantage of a slow housing market here.

We've been passively house hunting in UK but come post-Xmas - assuming I dont hear anything - in January its full steam ahead, time to take control.

helcat12

I feel for you.
I know of another applicant through Buffalo who s in exactly the same frame of mind at the moment.
This is what the system has done and is still doing to people.
There is a cost of money and an emotional cost to this and I understand what christmasoompa is saying but I still have issues.
The VOs are not following procedural fairness and that does not mean I expect everyone's processing to take the same time.
I expect there to be some consistency in their treatment of applicants.

Another Cat 2 on here who applied at the same time as we did had a very similar timeline to us up until the med request, at which point they got asked for new Police checks, new IM0008 and meds, while we got asked for police checks and IM0008 but NOT meds.

That doesn't make any sense, as our Police checks were clear and nothing has significantly changed on our IM0008 as the OH has been working in Canada since we applied, details of which they already have because he is Cat 2 so sent all his LMO and TWP docs at the start.
There was no reason to not include meds requests with this request for the other docs for us, even if they have some outstanding background checks to make.

We also got sent back our notarised documents and our University transcripts when we got the request but other applicants have not had those returned.

It seems as though there is no consistency to what the Officers do at each stage, which order they do things in or how long they take to do them.
There are many cases of such inconsistency in the VO processing.

Oh, when I was a student at University I rented a room in a house that was owned by a lovely Iraqi man who had been a student himself in the UK and lived there for years.
Nicest and fairest landlord I have ever had.
Maybe that is enough for them to consider I might have links to terrorism!!

woz718

So at what stage do we think that CIC will offer a refund to individuals that want to pull out, due to their misleading timescales and inefficiency?

Not a happy bunny. x

helcat12

I think that CIC should offer a refund to anyone who has been processed to any level within the pre-2008 applicants because they had a right to expect a decision (not necessarily a positive one before anyone picks up on that!) before now.

helcat12

Not meaning to contradict you, christmasoompa but just to ask the things that don't make sense to me or I suspect to other applicants through London, if it is just about background checks, can you explain why it is much quicker to process Pakistan applicants in London rather than UK citizens or residents?
I would have thought that it would be much slower, considering the time difference and also the language issues chasing up paperwork, references and educational qualifications.
Also, if background checks are the sticking point, then why is it that New Delhi, which has a massive area and number of applications to cover, can do post Feb 2008 applications in an average of 14 months (which has gone down recently) while London is putting their processing times UP?

Most of the VOs in Asia are quoting similar times to New Delhi. Only four out of these twelve offices exceed London in processing times and most are under 20 months.

Moondoggy

Yeah, I have always thought that the way they do some stuff is unfair, wrong and downright unsympathetic to the applicants.

I've said it before, but if the CIC they were a business they wouldn't get away with some of the stuff they do. You gotta remember also that for all applications you pay a fee, which in the business world would normally constituate a level of quality and customer service. They would have gone out of business long ago or been told to clean their act up by industry regulators if this was the private sector....

Poor service.