By Rosa Marchitelli, CBC News | Link to Article
A New Zealand man who has applied for permanent residency is struggling to keep his Ontario family together due to lengthy processing times at Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
By Rosa Marchitelli, CBC News | Link to Article
A New Zealand man who has applied for permanent residency is struggling to keep his Ontario family together due to lengthy processing times at Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Blair Hacche, who has been in Canada since February 2013, lives with Canadian fiancée Jenn Ward in Dorchester, where they are raising 13-month-old son, Dexter and six-year-old Ewan, Ward’s son from a previous relationship.
Hacche applied for residency this July, but he’s now facing a wait of more than a year before his application is initially approved, leaving him unable to work and support his young family in the meantime.
“[It’s] definitely been a struggle financially to keep the mortgage paid and keep up with all the bills. That’s definitely the biggest strain,” Hacche told Go Public.
Hacche, a university-educated computer programmer, applied for residency under the spouse sponsorship program, which goes through two stages of processing.
The average processing time for the first stage, an initial assessment of the couple, stood at 16 months at the time of writing. The second, a series of medical and background checks, adds an extra eight months.