When the pandemic began, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) gradually stopped processing the Permanent Residence (PR) applications (mainly the outland ones) due to which there has been an enormous backlog. The IRCC has started clearing proactively since the final quarter of the last year. However, many applications that are being held in their visa office in London, UK have yet to undergo even the initial stages of review such as the eligibility checks which are supposed to be started within days to only a few months of receiving applications, and applicants who have had these stages cleared have yet to have their applications finalized unlike in the other offices (Ottawa, Vienna, Centralized Intake Office, etc.) where at present applications are being finalized even in a few days. While applicants who applied much later have received their visas as their files are being dealt with in other offices, so many applications in the London office are absolutely untouched for as long as up to 17 months. The distress and the fear of uncertainty in these applicants are mounting every day as many of them have kept important decisions of their lives such as a new job, growing their families or getting a new degree on hold; and others have just invested so much time and resources into this. This petition is to bring to notice the plight of these applicants as communications with the visa office only yields generic responses. The goal is to either get the applications moving and processed adequately by the visa office or have the files transferred to offices which can deal better. Please sign the petition and hopefully with enough signatures the authorities will notice and act! Thank you so much for your support.

(Note: In the pictures, 'AOR' means Acknowledgement of Receipt of application; the date implies the day IRCC received the complete application. 'PPR' means passport request for visa.)