Canada’s Immigration Department has shut the door on new applications for the Parents and Grandparents Program this year, halting a pathway that thousands of families rely on to reunite with older relatives.
In a statement released Wednesday, officials said the decision is meant to bring the backlog under control and shorten processing times that have stretched well beyond two years. With 60,500 applications already sitting in the pipeline, the department says current wait times average around 33 months and can stretch to 66 months for applicants in Quebec.
The sponsorship program, which allows Canadian citizens and permanent residents to bring their parents or grandparents to the country permanently, has struggled with demand ever since it relaunched in 2020. That year alone drew more than 200,000 expressions of interest from people hoping to sponsor a family member, far outpacing the number of spots the government hands out annually.
Despite the freeze on new intake, the government says it won’t touch its existing commitment to approve up to 15,000 sponsorship applicants for permanent residence in both 2026 and 2027, according to an Immigration Department official. Those numbers fall under Ottawa’s broader immigration levels plan, unveiled last fall, which aims to welcome 380,000 permanent residents annually through 2028 while slashing the number of temporary work and study permits issued this year to roughly half of 2025’s total.
Taken together, the changes mean Canada’s population growth is expected to stay essentially flat in 2026, marking the second consecutive year without meaningful growth.
The move lands amid an increasingly tense national debate over immigration policy. Conservative critics have long argued the system is dysfunctional, accusing the Liberal government of eroding what was once broad public agreement that immigration benefits the country.
That criticism appears to have some grounding in the government’s own research. Internal briefing documents prepared for Immigration Minister Lena Diab last year reportedly showed public support for immigration sank in 2023 and 2024 to its lowest point in three decades. By November 2024, government polling found more than half of Canadians believed the country was accepting too many newcomers.
Diab addressed the shifting mood directly in a social media video posted in May, saying her department is focused on restoring order and long-term stability to the immigration system.
The sponsorship pause follows other recent moves to tighten immigration rules under Prime Minister Mark Carney. In March, his government passed legislation that narrows who can qualify for asylum retroactively voiding thousands of claims filed after a new cutoff date while also granting Ottawa sweeping authority to cancel visas en masse.
The parent and grandparent program is far from the only corner of Canada’s immigration system struggling to keep pace. As of April 30, more than 2.1 million applications were sitting across all immigration streams, and department figures show over 922,000 of them had already blown past official service standards. Fewer than half of permanent residency applications were processed within the government’s own targets.
Still, the system continues to produce results: between January and April of this year, 112,900 people were granted permanent residence through various programs.
For now, the government says the suspension on new parent and grandparent sponsorship applications will remain “until further notice.”
Families hoping to bring older relatives to Canada on a temporary basis still have an alternative. The super visa program remains open, allowing parents and grandparents to visit for stays of up to five years at a time, with a total permitted stay of up to 10 years.
