Hon. Marc Gold (Government Representative in the Senate): Thank you for the question and for highlighting this issue that is important both to the students who want to come here and also to our universities and our country that benefit from those students. The government understands the hardships, difficulties and uncertainties caused by longer wait times in their applications.

That’s why the government has taken a number of measures to do more to tackle the backlog while making the immigration system more sustainable in the long term. That includes the fact that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, or IRCC, will have hired approximately 1,250 new employees to improve processing capacity.

Allow me to share some figures with you regarding student permit processing. IRCC finalized almost 560,000 study permit applications in 2021, and that beats their previous record in 2019 by 31%. IRCC is already outpacing that amount this year, with almost 452,000 study permits finalized between January and August this year, which compares to about 367,000 finalized during the same period last year.

Government will be open and transparent in their plan to tackle the backlog and return to service standards. That’s why the government has, in fact, started publishing their progress online on a monthly basis.

Senator Gold: I’ll be brief. The government has put into place the measures I described. It believes that these will make a difference. We are on track to do better than last year, and the government will continue to do what it can to clear the backlog and make our universities accessible to those students from abroad who wish to come here.