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House Hansard - 60

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 28, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 60 - Apr/28/22
Hon. Sean Fraser (Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Lib.)
  • Apr/28/22 3:10:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague from Scarborough Centre for her passion for Canadian citizenship and for her work on behalf of her constituents. Since April 2020, more than 240,000 applicants have become Canadian citizens through virtual oath ceremonies. We had to pivot our strategy after it became impossible to host large events for people together in a room. We are now hosting 350 virtual ceremonies each month, and each week approximately 5,800 applicants are invited to deliver their oath virtually. I am happy to announce that just last month, we set an all-time record by welcoming more than 41,000 applicants to complete their journey toward Canadian citizenship. Moving forward, we are going to continue to explore more options. The hon. member began her—
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Context: House Hansard - 60 - Apr/28/22
Hon. Sean Fraser (Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Lib.)
  • Apr/28/22 3:13:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, over the last number of months, we have taken a number of steps to boost the processing capacity of IRCC, with $85 million announced in the fall economic statement. We have made available an additional $385 million to be processed in the recent federal budget. We are launching a modernization of the digital platform to boost processing time further and creating more immigration level space. The result of these investments is actually seeing the numbers in the express entry system under the federal high-skilled streams decrease from 112,000 to 48,000. The draws for the Canadian experience class in the federal skilled workers stream will resume this July, and we will be back to the service standard we enjoyed before COVID-19 was something we had ever heard of.
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