For six years, Rajesh Sharma has watched his parents grow older from half a world away.
The Vancouver area small businessman came to Canada from India, built a career, bought a home and met the income requirements to sponsor his mother and father.
His father’s health is failing. His mother now struggles to manage their home alone. Sharma spends his evenings arranging medical appointments from Canada and wondering how many more birthdays and family milestones they will miss.
Ottawa’s recent decision to suspend new applications for the Parent and Grandparent Program (PGP) until further notice has turned that uncertainty into something more final.
For Sharma and thousands of other immigrants, there is now no application date, no place in the queue and no assurance their aging parents will ever be able to join them permanently in Canada.
NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said the decision leaves Canadians and permanent residents with no date to apply, no guarantee the program will reopen and little hope of reuniting with aging parents caught outside the country.
“The government has shamefully once again suspended new intakes to the Parent and Grandparent sponsorship program,” she said.
“At this rate, it will take decades to clear the backlog. Families cannot afford to wait decades to be reunited with their parents and grandparents.”
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced July 15 that it will stop accepting new interest-to-sponsor forms and will not invite more potential sponsors to submit applications until further notice.
The department said it will continue processing applications already in the system and plans to approve up to 15,000 parents and grandparents for permanent residence in 2026.
The department currently has about 60,500 permanent residence applications under the Parents and Grandparents Program in progress.
Processing times are approximately 33 months outside Quebec and can reach 66 months in Quebec. About 54,000 expressions of interest from the original 2020 pool were still outstanding as of September 2025.
Kwan said the government is managing the backlog by restricting access rather than fixing a system that has kept families waiting for years.
“It has remained closed since 2020, shattering dreams of family reunification for thousands of Canadians and permanent residents,” she said.
“Families who have been eagerly waiting for the application system to reopen are once again being told by the Liberals that they are out of luck. It is a slap in the face of families who have waited so long to reunite with their loved ones.”
The suspension comes as Ottawa sharply reduces the number of parents and grandparents it plans to admit.
Under the 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan, the federal government has set a target of 15,000 admissions through the program in each of the next three years.
The previous plan had called for 21,500 admissions in 2026, meaning the new target represents a reduction of about 30 per cent.
