Ulysses said:
Hello Lisa, Thanks a lot for your reply and for sharing the excel sheet, that was really helpful.
Yes, it seems that 16 months is too high. In some other threads, I read about some PNP candidates being subjected to Quality Assurance which meant additional processing time. I don't know how that's done or whether these delays have got anything to do with that.
BTW, a friend of mine (Ontario PNP - Internatoinal Masters graduate, no job offer) recently got her passport request within less than a month of her medical assessment, which was super quick! Her Work permit was about to expire soon, I don't know if this has got anything to do with that.
No problem!
Yes, there was a QA process happening last year mainly with Ontario applicants, which delayed the processing significantly for a lot of them (although the delay seemed to be with giving AORs and medical requests - once those were finally done, they started getting the finalizations quite fast, within just a month or two, as opposed to waiting for 8-10 months like most of us). The whole thing was sparked by an independent evaluation of the OPNP system, which showed that there was an overwhelming percentage of misrepresentation and other fraudulent/suspicious activity in PNP cases that were already approved. Therefore CIC put a hold on those PR applications that were based on OPNP certificates, to make sure that those applicants actually had legitimate grounds to apply for PR.
Based on what I've seen here in the past 1.5 years, usually the long wait happens between "medicals received" and "in process". In process to DM = around 3-6 weeks; DM to PPR = 1-3 weeks.
Either way, CIC doesn't follow a set timeline and they're 100% authorized to speed up applications that they deem worthy, such as people with a high-demand job or like you said, a work permit expiring soon. And I keep saying this over and over - every case is unique and what applies to one person doesn't necessarily apply to others. If an applicant's home country doesn't have a properly working government and CIC has trouble obtaining information from them if it needs it, that will definitely slow down the processing. Or if an applicant happens to share their name with someone who's on a security black list, that will slow it down too. It's so hard for some people to understand why they don't necessarily get processed in the same exact conditions as someone else. Sure, the one thing that CIC could improve on is making the processing more transparent, so that applicants who get delayed would at least have the chance to know why things are not moving. But for CIC it's 100% a resource issue - with 285.000 new permanent residents accepted every year, plus every other type of immigration they process, the amount of extra work it would require to create and maintain an open system is just unfathomable.
Also it's worth noting that the new Express Entry has changed / will change all these timelines, once there are no more old-school paper applications in the processing queue. So it's very likely that whoever applied starting 2015 can expect at least somewhat different timelines.
