I really do not know. May be you have to call them. But we can request them to grant us to resubmit our paper based application online. You can see it takes around 15 months to process paper based application. But what happen if we loss our job because of corona. So waiting 15 months is a risk. I think if we all write and request them to grant us to RESUBMIT our paper based pnp application online, then processing time could reduce to 6 months. We all request. May be they will allow us.
I think you severely overestimate how much faster this new process would be (if at all).
EE is "quicker" because you need to have met certain requirements to even be invited. It's then processed quicker as the entire application process is done electronically from the beginning, the information can then be presented more efficiently on the processing agents side. The requirements are tighter, so there's less variation in the information they're reviewing.
Compared with the paper PNP process, where you would have completed a form, printed it out, then mailed it to the office in Sydney who then either scan each paper into their system or prepare individual packets for each application.
The only step being skipped here is the you printing it out and mailing it part - the rest of it remains the same.
PNP applications naturally have a lot more to verify and simply put there are far more points where the information is pending 3rd parties e.g. verifying your PNP certificate is real and still valid, verifying current employment, past employment, etc. All of the information is also on paper, so it's harder to verify. Not to mention agents are also verifying for every province, not just yours. Even if the application was submitted electronically, the agent is still scrolling through your scanned application packet looking for information they need.
I totally understand your frustration because I'm in the same boat, our lives are essentially on hold until we receive CoPR. It's frustrating to see new CEC draws inviting all applicants when we could have applied for that but figured we were OK with our already submitted paper application. It's frustrating to see new programmes be announced while there's still a backlog of hundreds of thousands of applications waiting to even start to be processed. All of this is frustrating, but requesting to scan your application in electronically is just going to put you to the back of an already very long queue.
