The PGP woes continue
On July 15, 2026, the federal government announced that they would be indefinitely pausing the Parents and Grandparents Program (PGP), a popular family sponsorship program. Promising to continue processing applications that have already been submitted, the government expects to approve up to 15,000 people for permanent residence both this year and next.
While these numbers may look impressive at first, it’s important to note that there are over 60,000 applications in process and that processing times are almost 3 years long. For an applicant-population that skews older due to the nature of the program, including the income requirements of sponsors in Canada, these processing times are extra burdensome.
The current version of the PGP was introduced in 2020, with over 200,000 Canadian citizens and permanent residents signing up for a chance to bring their parent or grandparent to Canada. But since then, the program has been mirred by procedural and practical difficulties, in part due to pandemic-related office and border restrictions, and in part due to the program never being given the priority that it deserves.
My own family accessed a previous iteration of the parent sponsorship program when we sponsored my maternal grandfather to join us in Canada. After taking our Citizenship oath, and applying for Canadian passports, it was the very next bureaucratic decision our family took.
He moved to Toronto in 1995, built a successful business with a Yonge/Bloor storefront, and was well beloved in the Canadian-Bangladeshi community. He passed away in Toronto in 2018, and I cannot imagine our family, or my life, without his constant presence over his 23 years of living here. He was the source of my first allowance at age 10; present at every graduation I ever experienced in Toronto (usually showing up hours earlier than my family to save them all great seats); and a constant cheerleader. When I moved out on my own, he would periodically email me baby photographs he just happened to find as a thinly veiled reminder to give him a call to say hi. My heart breaks at the reality that so many families, and so many children, will continue to be robbed of this experience for the indefinite future.
It would be nice of both Minister Diab and Prime Minister Carney to remember that a core objective of our immigration scheme is “to see that families are reunited in Canada”. The Immigration and Refugee Protect Act went so far as to codify this objective in section 3(1)(d) and I hope that the Canadian government starts to take this commitment seriously again.