The Queue That Never Moves:Canada's Security Screening Backlog and What It Means for Those Who Wait
- DRASInt® Risk Alliance
- Mar 17
- 12 min read
Updated: Mar 18
Risk domain: Immigration entry processing
Picture this, you have done everything right. You submitted your application. You passed your medical examination. Your police certificates are clean. You paid your fees on time, kept your documents in order, and waited patiently, for Canada to confirm that you belong here. Then the weeks became months. The months became years. The portal still reads "In Progress." No explanation. No timeline. No answer.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is the lived experience of thousands of permanent residence applicants currently caught in Canada's comprehensive security screening backlog, a bureaucratic bottleneck that has stretched a government published 110 day service standard into what immigration lawyers, working from access to information data, estimate to be an average actual processing time of approximately 64.8 months, nearly five and a half years.
DRASInt Risk Alliance has prepared this advisory for travellers, skilled workers, their families and the organisations responsible for them. It explains what is happening, why it matters and what can realistically be done. It draws exclusively on verified government data, published Federal Court decisions and expert practitioner analysis. The facts, as they stand, are remarkable enough on their own.
When 98 per cent of applicants eventually pass security screening, the question worth asking is not who the system is catching, but whether the net has been cast far too wide.
THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE DELAY
Canada's Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, universally known as IRCC, publishes service standards for every category of application it processes. For permanent residence applications, the published standard is 110 days. In practice, files referred to comprehensive security screening are taking far longer.
Immigration lawyers Steven Meurrens and Lev Abramovich, speaking on Episode 201 of the Borderlines Canadian Immigration Law Podcast in 2025, discussed access to information data that puts the estimated actual processing time at around 64.8 months for applications caught in this stage. To put that in perspective, an applicant whose file entered security screening at the beginning of 2021 may still be waiting today.
The scale of the broader backlog provides essential context. IRCC's published inventory data, as reported by CIC News in February 2026, shows that as of December 2025, more than one million applications across all immigration categories had exceeded their respective service standards. Of the 928,800 permanent residence applications in the system as of October 2025, some 501,300 were in backlog. Total IRCC inventory across all categories stood at over 2.1 million applications.
The security screening component of this backlog is especially striking when measured against its own outcomes. ATIP disclosed data discussed in the Borderlines podcast shows that in 2025, IRCC received 8,841 favourable security opinions and just 166 non favourable ones from partner agencies. That is an approval rate comfortably above 97 per cent. The system is referring enormous volumes of applications to a resource constrained pipeline and the vast majority pass anyway.
More than one million immigration applications had exceeded Canada's own service standards as of December 2025.
HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS AND WHERE IT BREAKS
Security screening in Canadian immigration is not a single step but a layered process. When IRCC processes a permanent residence application, most files clear standard database checks without issue. A subset, no precise figure is publicly disclosed are referred to partner agencies for deeper review. The two principal partners are the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). This deeper review is what practitioners call comprehensive security screening, and it is this stage where delays accumulate.
Immigration lawyers and analysts who work with ATIP disclosed case data have observed that referrals to this stage are often triggered by broad characteristics nationality, country of birth, historical associations rather than by specific, evidence based intelligence about an individual. The operational consequence of over referral is structural, the pipeline was designed for a relatively small number of genuinely high risk cases. When it is flooded with low risk files, it slows for everyone, including the few cases that genuinely warrant close scrutiny.
There is a separate dynamic worth noting. IRCC's own modernisation efforts have incorporated advanced analytics and automated triage to speed routine processing. This means that straightforward applications are being cleared faster than before. The unintended effect is that the complex cases and the security referrals are increasingly isolated at the back of the queue, concentrated without the throughput to match.
Meanwhile, the person waiting has almost no visibility into what is happening. Their IRCC portal shows their file as active. They cannot compel a decision. If their work permit expires while they wait, they must apply to renew it and hope the renewal processes before their status lapses. The legal concept of 'maintained status' provides some protection, it allows a person to remain in Canada while a renewal is pending but only if the renewal application was filed before the prior permit expired. A missed deadline can unravel years of carefully maintained status.
THE HUMAN WEIGHT OF WAITING
Statistics convey the scale of a problem. They do not convey its texture. The people caught in this backlog are, by design, exactly the kind of immigrants Canada has said it wants, physicians, software engineers, construction professionals, researchers, skilled workers recruited through economic immigration pathways precisely because the country needs what they bring.
For many of them, the wait means prolonged separation from family members abroad who cannot join them until a final decision is made. It means careers placed in suspension, because some employers are unwilling to promote, assign to long term projects, or invest in employees whose future status is unresolved. It means repeated and expensive medical exam renewals, since the results of the initial exam have a finite validity period. It means accumulating legal fees, ATIP requests, status renewal applications and for some, Federal Court proceedings.
It also means a particular kind of psychological strain that is difficult to quantify and easy to dismiss, the strain of not knowing. Of checking a portal that never changes. Of not being able to plan a holiday, a mortgage, a family reunion, because the ground beneath one's feet remains unconfirmed.
Canada's 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan targets 380,000 new permanent residents annually, with explicit emphasis on healthcare workers and skilled tradespeople where labour shortages are acute. A physician in a five year security screening queue is not treating patients in that time. An engineer waiting for a PR decision is not contributing to the infrastructure projects her programme was designed to support. The OECD's International Migration Outlook has consistently found that skilled immigrants contribute most when they can access the labour market quickly. Delay is not a neutral administrative inconvenience, it is an economic subtraction.
A physician in a five year security screening queue is not treating patients in that time.
WHEN ADMINISTRATION FAILS: THE COURTS STEP IN
When an immigration delay becomes sufficiently long and unexplained, applicants have one formal legal remedy, an application to the Federal Court of Canada for a writ of mandamus. A mandamus order compels the government to make a decision, not necessarily a positive one, but a decision. Its use in immigration matters has grown sharply as the backlog has deepened, and the Federal Court's posture on these cases has hardened accordingly.
In Habibi v. Canada (2025 FC 1675), the Court granted mandamus in a citizenship application delayed 36 months by an unexplained security check and, unusually, awarded costs against the government on the grounds that IRCC had offered what the judge described as an unsatisfactory justification for the delay. In Majidi v. Canada (2025 FC 680), a Start-Up Visa permanent residence application had been pending approximately five years. In Saqib Javed v. Canada (2025 FC 987), an Express Entry application had been delayed for 49 months — eight times the published standard. In Peng v. Canada (2025 FC 2), the Court granted an early mandamus, signalling increased judicial willingness to intervene even before delays reach the most extreme durations.
The Federal Court has repeatedly stated that citing an ongoing CSIS investigation — without specific evidence of progress, complexity, or a projected timeline — does not constitute an adequate justification for a lengthy delay. The core legal test remains whether the delay is unreasonable in all the circumstances; recent jurisprudence suggests the bar for that finding has become easier to clear as the pattern of delay has become more entrenched.
The institutional cost of this dynamic is significant. Each mandamus application consumes court time and government legal resources, in addition to the considerable expense borne by the applicant — typically upward of five thousand dollars in legal fees, often considerably more for complex cases. Across hundreds of applications annually, this represents a substantial drain on judicial infrastructure that would not be necessary if the underlying administrative system were functioning within its own published standards.
PARLIAMENT TAKES NOTICE: PETITION E-7259
In March 2026, a parliamentary petition catalogued as e-7259 was filed with the House of Commons. It was initiated by Sixuan Zhang and sponsored by NDP Member of Parliament Jenny Kwan, who represents Vancouver East and serves as the Official Opposition immigration critic. The petition gathered more than 11,000 signatures within ten days of opening, an extraordinary level of engagement for a petition concerned with the technical mechanics of administrative processing.
The petition's demands are specific and structural. It calls on Parliament to require that any application exceeding 100 per cent of its published service standard must either be finalised immediately or receive a written justification accompanied by a firm completion date. It calls for quarterly ministerial appearances before the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration to report on backlog reduction. It calls for mandatory 90 day status updates to applicants with delayed files, including disclosure of which agency currently holds the file and at what stage. And it calls for the establishment of an independent Immigration Ombudsperson, a formal escalation channel independent of IRCC itself.
The speed with which the petition gathered support is itself informative. Petitions of this technical nature rarely achieve this volume of signatures in this timeframe. The signatories engineers, healthcare workers, parents, professionals, represent precisely the cohort Canada's economic immigration programmes are designed to attract and retain. Their willingness to engage formally with Parliament is a signal that the frustration is no longer confined to individual cases or specialist legal circles; it has become a visible public policy concern.
The petition gathered more than 11,000 signatures in ten days, an extraordinary response to a question about administrative processing.
WHAT SMARTER SCREENING WOULD LOOK LIKE
It is important to be clear about what this advisory does not argue. Security screening is a non negotiable function of any serious immigration system. No country should process applicants without it. The question raised by the data is not whether screening should exist, but whether the current screening system is allocating its limited capacity intelligently.
If more than 97 per cent of files that enter comprehensive security screening are ultimately approved, the referral mechanism may be catching too broadly. Immigration practitioners who work with these cases consistently observe that referrals appear to be triggered by demographic characteristics, nationality, country of birth, rather than by behaviour, based indicators of actual risk: documented security affiliations, suspicious financial activity, credible intelligence flags, or verified organisational ties. A system that relies heavily on the former and lightly on the latter will, by definition, generate large numbers of low risk referrals.
A tiered screening architecture, in which low risk applicants are cleared through automated database verification, moderate cases receive enhanced review, and only applications with credible specific indicators enter the resource intensive comprehensive investigation stage would dramatically reduce the volume entering the most constrained part of the pipeline. Comparable frameworks operate in other national security contexts globally and are not novel in their conception.
Automatic internal escalation for any file exceeding its service standard by 100 per cent would prevent the silent accumulation of stalled cases. Mandatory 90-day status updates, disclosing which agency holds the file, what stage it is at, and an estimated completion window, would cost relatively little to implement and would substantially reduce the volume of ATIP requests, MP correspondence, and mandamus applications that currently serve as the only ways applicants can find out what is happening. And systematic publication of granular processing data referral rates, stage by stage timelines, outcomes by category, would create the accountability conditions that enable better policy.
These are not untested proposals. They are the logical extension of service standard accountability principles that already exist in Canadian federal administration, applied to a corner of government that has been allowed to operate without them.
GUIDANCE FOR APPLICANTS AND ORGANISATIONS
DRASInt Risk Alliance offers the following practical guidance. It reduces vulnerability; it does not guarantee a faster outcome. Case-specific advice should always be sought from a regulated Canadian immigration consultant or a licensed immigration lawyer.
If you are waiting for a permanent residence decision
Track your application milestones carefully from the outset. Keep certified copies of every receipt, biometrics confirmation, and communication from IRCC. Renew any work permit or study permit at least 90 days before it expires, do not wait until the last moment. If your renewal is still pending when the current permit expires, maintained status may protect you, but only if the renewal was filed before expiry.
If your application has exceeded 18 months beyond the published processing time with no substantive communication, consider filing an Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) request for your GCMS notes. These are the internal case officer notes that show where your file sits in the system and whether a security referral has been made. The information will not accelerate your file, but it will tell you what you are dealing with.
If the delay is extended, is causing documented hardship, and you have evidence of family separation or employment consequences, consult an immigration lawyer about the viability of a mandamus application. Recent Federal Court decisions in 2025 have lowered the practical threshold somewhat you do not need to demonstrate extraordinary prejudice to succeed, and the courts have shown increased scepticism of government justifications that amount to nothing more than a general reference to ongoing review.
If you are an employer or HR mobility manager
Build a minimum 24-month buffer into immigration timelines for any permanent residence conversion. The published six month standard for Express Entry does not reflect reality for files that enter security screening, and there is no way to know in advance whether a given application will be referred.
Establish contingency plans for work permit extensions. Do not assume a PR decision will arrive before a work permit expires, model your staffing and compliance planning on the assumption that it will not. Monitor the parliamentary response to petition e-7259, which is expected before May 2026 and may signal process changes that affect your planning assumptions.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Canada's immigration system is, in most respects, a genuine success. It has welcomed millions of people from every part of the world and built a society that is, by most measures, pluralistic and prosperous. The ambition encoded in annual admissions targets, 380,000 new permanent residents in 2026, reflects a genuine national commitment to growth through immigration.
That is precisely what makes the security screening backlog so worth fixing. The people waiting are not adversaries of the system; they are the people the system invited. They completed the forms, passed the checks, paid the fees, and waited in good faith. The dysfunction they encounter is not a reflection of their eligibility, as the 97-plus per cent approval rate makes clear, but a reflection of a process that has lost its footing.
The 11,000 signatures on petition e-7259 are not a political protest. They are a direct, formal communication from physicians and engineers and parents to the institution that governs their lives, asking a question that deserves a direct answer: if we have done everything right, why are we still waiting?
Efficient security screening and humane immigration processing are not competing objectives. They are mutually reinforcing ones. A system that focuses its finite investigative capacity on genuine risks clears more cases, generates less litigation, retains more talent, and does more good. The data points toward reform. The court decisions point toward reform. The parliament petition points toward reform. The direction is clear.
Efficient security screening and humane immigration processing are not competing objectives. They are mutually reinforcing ones.
DRASInt Mandates - https://www.drasintrisk.com/drasintriskmandates Most Sellable Risk Management Products
Testing and Certification
📞 Contact Us for free Consultation:
Mobile Number:+918290439442, Email-forensic@drasintrisk.com
🚀Innovate, Navigate, Thrive!
DRASINT RISK ALLIANCE is the sole owner of the published content
DRASInt RISK ALLIANCE is committed to protecting copyright and investigating literary theft claims. Third-party copyright violations will be addressed and action may be taken. Databases and distributors can create copies for dissemination.
SOURCES AND REFERENCES
This advisory draws exclusively on the following verified primary and secondary sources. No claim is made that cannot be traced to one of these origins.
Parliamentary record — Petition e-7259, Parliament of Canada (ourcommons.ca), March 2026. Initiated by Sixuan Zhang; sponsored by MP Jenny Kwan. Available at ourcommons.ca until 10 May 2026.
Government processing data — IRCC application inventory and service standards, Government of Canada (canada.ca).
Monthly inventory reports, October and December 2025. Backlog figures cited from CIC News, 'IRCC total backlog hits new highs, Express Entry inventory plummets,' February 2026 (cicnews.com).
Security screening outcomes — ATIP-disclosed data on security opinions (8,841 favourable; 166 non-favourable, 2025), discussed by immigration lawyers Steven Meurrens and Lev Abramovich on the Borderlines Canadian Immigration Law Podcast, Episode 201, 2025. The 64.8-month processing time estimate derives from the same source.
Federal Court jurisprudence — Habibi v. Canada, 2025 FC 1675; Majidi v. Canada, 2025 FC 680; Tousi v. Canada, 2025 FC 671; Saqib Javed v. Canada, 2025 FC 987; Peng v. Canada, 2025 FC 2. Case summaries reviewed via gleelaw.com, dadkhah.ca, and gands.com.
Economic integration research — OECD International Migration Outlook 2023 (oecd.org); Statistics Canada, Immigrant Labour Market Outcomes in Canada, 2023.
Immigration policy framework — 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, Government of Canada (canada.ca); 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan, Government of Canada.
Recommended reading for anyone navigating Canadian permanent residence, advising those who are, or following the intersection of immigration policy and national security administration.