IRCC’s 2025 Parents and Grandparents Program: Key Updates

On March 7, 2025, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced its plans for the Parents and Grandparents (PGP) Program, a vital avenue for Canadian citizens and permanent residents to reunite with their loved ones. Family reunification remains a cornerstone of Canada’s immigration system, and this update provides insight into how IRCC intends to manage the program in the year ahead.

Application Intake: A Limited Window

For 2025, IRCC will accept up to 10,000 complete applications under the PGP Program. Rather than opening a new call for “interest to sponsor” forms, the department will once again draw from a pool of submissions collected in 2020, randomly selecting potential sponsors from that group. However, it means that families who missed the 2020 window will need to explore other options. The latter is extremely frustrating to Canadians who are yet again unable to sponsor their parents and highlights IRCC’s broken processing regime.

Processing Timelines: Patience Required

As of February 5, 2025, IRCC reports processing times of approximately 24 months for PGP applications destined outside Quebec, extending to 48 months for those headed to Quebec due to the province’s distinct family class targets. These timelines reflect IRCC’s efforts to balance application volumes with the spaces available under the 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan, which has introduced reduced overall targets. The lengthy waits—particularly for Quebec-bound applicants—underscore the continued challenges families face in planning for reunification.

The Super Visa: An Alternative Pathway

For those unable to participate in the PGP Program, IRCC highlights the super visa as an option. This allows parents and grandparents to visit for up to five years per entry, with multiple entries permitted over a decade. Recent changes to the health insurance requirement have made the super visa more flexible, offering a practical solution for extended stays. Though it doesn’t provide permanent residency, it serves as a bridge for families seeking meaningful time together while awaiting broader program updates.

A Broken System

The 2025 PGP Program reflects IRCC’s ongoing efforts to align family reunification with broader immigration goals. That said, the decision to cap applications at 10,000, rely on a 2020 pool, and manage extended processing times evidences IRCC’s mishandling of the parental sponsorship stream. It is high time IRCC finds a way to increase the number of parental sponsorships and starts inviting applicants in the post-2020 pools. Parental sponsorships are essential to keep highly skilled individuals living in Canada, despite the added health care costs of inviting elderly people to the country. The extra health care burden must be weighed against the economic benefits that highly skilled immigrants bring to Canada. We believe it is better to allow elderly parents to move to Canada than to have new Canadians at the peak of their working lives leave Canada because they have to care of aging parents. Needless to say, the latter only makes sense if, in fact, most of the immigrants to Canada are contributing to the economy and to society in positive ways. This is why PGP programs have minimum income cut-offs spread over the previous three years before an application is submitted.