The federal immigration department is facing calls to rethink a key family reunification program after it paused applications to sponsor grandparents and parents to settle in Canada as permanent residents, leaving thousands waiting years for their loved ones to join them.
On Wednesday, IRCC announced on its website that it will not accept any new formal expressions of interest to sponsor parents and grandparents to settle in Canada until further notice. It said it would also pause invitations to potential sponsors to apply to bring their parents and grandparents here to settle.
In a statement, Taous Ait, a spokesperson for immigration minister Lena Metlege Diab said the measures are “part of broader efforts to restore balance across immigration programs and support timely processing, while maintaining public confidence in Canada’s immigration system.”
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She said decisions to open or pause new intakes to the program follow assessments of the number of people in “its inventory and application inventory, each year.”
“IRCC will continue processing up to 15,000 individuals this year who have already applied, in line with our Immigration Levels Plan,” she added.
The Parents and Grandparents Program (PGP) is a lottery-like pathway to permanent residence for family members who are foreign nationals. Demand to settle here under the program has far outstripped the number of permanent residence spots available under the government’s immigration targets.
In the 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan, published in last year’s budget, the government cut its target for new permanent residents under the parents and grandparents program to 15,000 in each of the three years.
In the previous 2025-2027 plan, its target was to admit 21,500 under the program this year.
Ottawa has allowed parents and grandparents living overseas to join family here for years. But in 2020, IRCC established a system creating a pool of expressions of interest-to-sponsor parents and grandparents. There were more than 200,000 responses in 2020. IRCC invited applications to settle here from this pool in subsequent years.
IRCC has previously been criticized for not opening up the pool to allow other immigrants to bring their parents and grandparents to join them permanently.
In a September, 2025 briefing note prepared for Liberal ministers at Question Period about 54,000 expressions of interest-to-sponsor remained from the 2020 pool that year. Ms. Ait said 60,500 applications for permanent residence under the program are in progress.
But NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said the system, which includes windows to formally apply, needed to be changed, including “setting standards to ensure that families are reunited in a reasonable period of time.”
The “government has shamefully once again suspended new intakes to the Parent/Grandparent sponsorship program,” she said in a statement.
“It has remained closed since 2020, shattering dreams of family reunification for thousands of Canadians and permanent residents. Families who have been eagerly waiting for the application system to reopen, are once again being told by the Liberals that they are out of luck. It is a slap in the face of families who has waited so long to reunite with their loved ones.”
“At this rate, it will take decades to clear the backlog of those who submitted their interest to sponsor their parents or grandparents,” she said. “Families cannot afford to wait decades to be reunited with their parents and grandparents.”
In order to sponsor parents and grandparents, people living in Canada must show that they have a certain level of income. They must also commit to financially supporting their parents and grandparents. Although those sponsored gain permanent residence, they cannot use government social-assistance programs. However, they can access health care.
Calgary immigration lawyer Yameena Ansari said the waits are so long for people wanting to bring their parents and grandparents to Canada some have died during the process.
She said there is a scramble to apply when windows to do so are opened as they were from July to October in 2025.
Ms. Ansari said the current system “is kind of like a lottery, but there’s hundreds of thousands of people in the pool.”
“Every two years or so they open the lottery and people have a limited amount of time to submit to the lottery and then they close it. The majority of time it’s closed.”
“I do think there should be a rethink,” she said, adding the government did not seem to want older people to come here from abroad because of the strain on the health care system.
Many immigrant families who want their parents and grandparents to join them currently do so using super visas, lasting for five years. But health care costs must be covered privately under such visas.