Sponsor your Family to Immigrate to Canada

Canada welcomes more than 100,000 immigrants through family sponsorship each year.

IRCC welcomes about 80 per cent of these immigrants under the Spouses, Partners, and Children Program, and the remaining 20 per cent under the Parents and Grandparents Program. This comprehensive CanadaVisa page provides an overview on how to sponsor your family for immigration to Canada.

Overview of Canadian Immigration Family Sponsorship

Family reunification is one of the pillars of Canada’s immigration system. Since the end of the Second World War, Canada has sought to welcome immigrants to strengthen its economy, bring families together, and on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. The family class is the second largest category of newcomers welcomed by Canada under its Immigration Levels Plan.
The country’s immigration system is managed by the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada or IRCC for short. IRCC establishes and administers Canada’s family sponsorship program. This entails establishing program criteria, accepting and reviewing family sponsorship applications, and providing permanent and temporary resident visas.

What is Canadian family sponsorship?

There are two main aspects to sponsorship:
1) It allows your family member to immigrate to Canada and get permanent residence (PR).
2) It requires you, as an individual, to make a commitment to provide for basic needs and to support that person financially.

How is COVID-19 impacting family sponsorship?

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is still accepting family sponsorship applications.
While the processing of sponsorship applications has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the Canadian government continues to look for innovative and compassionate ways to reunite families.
Here are some of the steps that have been taken:

• IRCC has increased the number of staff who will review spousal sponsorship applications by 66% to reduce wait times and process applications more quickly.
• IRCC is also implementing a pilot project that will use new technology to digitize paper applications for faster processing.
• IRCC has indicated that it may implement biometric facilitation measures and introduce technology to conduct interviews with applicants remotely.
• If you received Employment Insurance and Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), you can still sponsor your spouse, parent, grandparent, child or other family member as long as you meet all the requirements to be a sponsor.
• If the person you have sponsored received Employment Insurance (EI) or CERB during the undertaking period, this will not cause you to have to default on your obligations.

Visit our COVID-19 page to get the latest updates on how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting family class immigration sponsorship.