By Mata Press Service

For six years, Rajesh Sharma has watched his parents grow older from half a world away.

The Vancouver area small businessman came to Canada from India, built a career, bought a home and met the income requirements to sponsor his mother and father.

His father’s health is failing. His mother now struggles to manage their home alone. Sharma spends his evenings arranging medical appointments from Canada and wondering how many more birthdays and family milestones they will miss.

Ottawa’s recent decision to suspend new applications for the Parent and Grandparent Program (PGP) until further notice has turned that uncertainty into something more final.

For Sharma and thousands of other immigrants, there is now no application date, no place in the queue and no assurance their aging parents will ever be able to join them permanently in Canada.

NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said the decision leaves Canadians and permanent residents with no date to apply, no guarantee the program will reopen and little hope of reuniting with aging parents caught outside the country.

“The government has shamefully once again suspended new intakes to the Parent and Grandparent sponsorship program,” she said.

“At this rate, it will take decades to clear the backlog. Families cannot afford to wait decades to be reunited with their parents and grandparents.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced July 15 that it will stop accepting new interest-to-sponsor forms and will not invite more potential sponsors to submit applications until further notice.

The department said it will continue processing applications already in the system and plans to approve up to 15,000 parents and grandparents for permanent residence in 2026.

The department currently has about 60,500 permanent residence applications under the Parents and Grandparents Program in progress.

Processing times are approximately 33 months outside Quebec and can reach 66 months in Quebec. About 54,000 expressions of interest from the original 2020 pool were still outstanding as of September 2025.

Kwan said the government is managing the backlog by restricting access rather than fixing a system that has kept families waiting for years.

“It has remained closed since 2020, shattering dreams of family reunification for thousands of Canadians and permanent residents,” she said.

“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 have waited so long to reunite with their loved ones.”

The suspension comes as Ottawa sharply reduces the number of parents and grandparents it plans to admit.

Under the 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan, the federal government has set a target of 15,000 admissions through the program in each of the next three years.

The previous plan had called for 21,500 admissions in 2026, meaning the new target represents a reduction of about 30 per cent.

It is also far below recent admission levels. Canada admitted 28,285 parents and grandparents in 2023, while earlier federal plans projected 32,000 admissions in 2024 and 34,000 in 2025.

The Parents and Grandparents Program is one of the most heavily oversubscribed streams in Canada’s immigration system.

It allows Canadian citizens and permanent residents to sponsor their parents or grandparents for permanent residence, but applicants must first be selected from a pool of people who have filed an interest-to-sponsor form.

The system has operated as a lottery since 2020, when IRCC received more than 200,000 expressions of interest.

Rather than reopen the pool in later years, the department continued drawing names from the same 2020 list.

IRCC issued 13,400 invitations in the 2020 intake, 34,500 in 2021 and 23,100 in 2022. In 2025, it again selected applicants from the remaining 2020 pool and planned to accept up to 10,000 complete applications.

That approach has left anyone who became eligible after 2020 without a chance to enter the sponsorship system.

The suspension is expected to have a heavy impact on immigrant communities in Ontario and Western Canada, where most sponsors live.

IRCC data from the 2020 to 2022 intakes showed that 44 per cent of sponsors lived in Ontario and 42 per cent lived in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba.

India accounted for 36 per cent of sponsors by country of birth, followed by the Philippines at 12 per cent and China at 11 per cent. Iran accounted for five per cent and Pakistan four per cent.

The data suggests the pause will fall heavily on immigrants who came to Canada as skilled workers, built careers, paid taxes, met federal income requirements and then sought to reunite with parents left overseas.

The government says families can still use the super visa, which allows eligible parents and grandparents to stay in Canada for up to five years at a time and provides multiple entries over 10 years.

The super visa, however, does not provide permanent residence. Applicants must maintain private medical insurance and remain subject to temporary-resident rules.

The PGP suspension is part of a broader federal effort to slow immigration after years of record population growth and mounting public concern over housing, health care and public services.

The government plans to admit about 380,000 permanent residents in 2026 and has also reduced targets for international students and temporary foreign workers.

Ottawa has said the cuts are needed to restore control, reduce pressure on public services and rebuild confidence in the immigration system.