News conference. During a press congerence yesterday at the Delta Meadowvale Hotel & Conference Centre, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announces that the federal government will accept 25,000 parents and grandparents under its family reunification plan. Supplied photo

John Stewart
Nov 06, 2012 – 8:58 AM

Immigration family plan is working: Kenney

News conference. During a press congerence yesterday at the Delta Meadowvale Hotel & Conference Centre, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announces that the federal government will accept 25,000 parents and grandparents under its family reunification plan.

Supplied photo
The federal government’s scheme to reunify families faster is working, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said yesterday in Mississauga.
“We listened to Canadians who told us the old program with eight-year wait times just didn’t work,” Kenney told a press conference at the Delta Meadowvale Hotel & Conference Centre.
“We expect to reunite up to 35,000 parents and grandparents with their families next year,” the minister said. “This is a significant achievement and the highest number in nearly two decades.”
The Conservative government’s plan for reunifying families, tabled last week, will see 25,000 parents and grandparents admitted to Canada for the second year in a row. That’s a 60 per cent jump since 2010, Kenney said.
The backlog of applications from Canadians seeking to bring their parents and/or grandparents to this country was about 165,000 when the Conservatives took office, the minister said. That number will have been reduced by about 20 per cent by the end of the year, he said.
A new “super visa” program that allows parents and grandparents to visit Canada for up to two years at a time has also proven very popular, Kenney said. Since it started in November 2011, more than 10,000 super visas have been issued.

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Article posted in Family reunification/Sponsorship, Immigration, Reform, Reports/Statistics/Opinions, etc.
  • Cheryl

    You have Canadian families torn apart by being forced to move across country to be able to have a job to survive and yet the government is not doing a thing to reunite these families!!! You have to wonder why they won’t pay to reunite these Canadian families! The government of Canada has more respect for the newcomers than for the people that have lived and paid taxes all of their lives in this great country!! Most Canadians don’t have the money to visit all over the country to see their relatives!!! So you have to wonder don’t you!!!!

  • Rocky Mountain

    But they wouldn’t need to be re-united if they had stayed in their country-of-origin. Maybe a condition of immigration should be that a “newcomer” waives all rights to family re-unification. I mean this could go on forever especially since some third world countries have very large extended families and I’m sure verification is very difficult if not impossible.

  • Winston_Jack

    Absolutely sickening. So apparently our publicly funded health care system is so under used that we need to import more people to take advantage of it. Heck, who cares about Canadians who have worked here all of their lives and have paid taxes for our health care?

  • FourFooted_Messiah

    If mommy and daddy and auntie and uncle and granny and grampa and all your kissin’ cousins are so darned important, maybe you shouldn’t have left them in the first place.

    As Cheryl notes below, it’s been nearly traditional for Canadians to move about the country. But no one ever cared about that.