Canada to grant special work permits to Hongkongers seeking permanent residency in bid to retain them amid case backlog
- New measure to be implemented on May 27 onwards, remain in place for five years to allow applicants to extend temporary status in Canada, Ottawa says
- ‘Processing times for this pathway have grown and many applicants are at risk of seeing their temporary status in Canada expire before their permanent residence applications are finalised,’ it adds
Canada will allow Hong Kong permanent residency applicants to seek special work permits while they wait for a decision on their cases.
Ottawa announced the new measure on Tuesday, in an effort to keep Hongkongers from being forced to leave Canada amid thousands of backlogged cases.
The move was in response to the mounting calls from politicians who said the prolonged processing times for approving residency applications left Hongkongers with looming uncertainty about their work and study statuses expiring.
Canada rolled out a bespoke migration pathway for Hongkongers in 2021 in the wake of the Beijing-imposed national security law. Canada’s policies, which target young people, recent graduates and those who have studied there, have been the friendliest, compared with those of Britain and Australia.
“Due to a high volume of applications, processing times for this pathway have grown, and many applicants are at risk of seeing their temporary status in Canada expire before their permanent residence applications are finalised,” Ottawa said on Tuesday.
“A new public policy will be launched in the coming weeks to let Hong Kong permanent residence pathway applicants extend their status and get a new open work permit in Canada while they wait for a decision on their permanent residence applications.”
The government added that the new move would be implemented on May 27 and would remain in place for five years to allow Hong Kong applicants to extend their temporary status in the country.
But it also reminded applicants that they would not be granted work permits if they did not make their applications within 90 days after their temporary status had expired.
MP Jenny Kwan, the New Democratic Party critic for housing, immigration, refugees and citizenship who had been advocating for the renewal of Hong Kong applicants’ work and study permits, welcomed the new policy on Tuesday.
“A more effective and efficient measure would have been to simply automatically renew Hongkongers’ expiring work and study permits so that scarce resources can be put to expedite the processing of permanent resident applications,” she said.
“However, this interim measure will help ensure those faced with prolonged processing delays for their permanent resident application are not forced to return to Hong Kong.”
Kwan argued this was particularly the case following the enactment of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance in Hong Kong, spanning 39 offences divided into five categories: treason; insurrection, incitement to mutiny and disaffection, and acts with seditious intention; sabotage; external interference; and theft of state secrets and espionage.
Kwan earlier said more than 8,000 applications submitted by Hongkongers were stuck in the system, with the processing time going up from six months when the special migration pathway was first introduced to as long as 21 months.
More than 14,680 people earlier signed a petition demanding that Canada accelerate the approval process, saying the lack of measures in extending the open work permits earlier had left some individuals with expired visas without access to health insurance, jobs and education.
As of last August, 9,947 Hongkongers had applied for permanent residency via the Canadian pathway that consists of “work-to-emigrate” and “study-to-emigrate” routes, with 5,245 of them having their applications approved.
Additional reporting by Connor Mycroft
