The Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) was initiated in 1992 as part of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). The LCP is meant to attract qualified workers to provide in-home care services for children, seniors or people with disabilities and to meet labour shortages when there are not enough Canadians or Permanent Residents available.
The LCP is also meant to facilitate TFW applications for Permanent Residence based on Canadian work experience as Caregivers. For Permanent Residence applications under this category, Caregivers have three pathways, and they include:
- Caring for Children
- Caring for People with High Medical Needs; or
- Live-in Caregiver Program.
To be eligible for Permanent Residence status under this category, the Caregiver does not need to live in the home of the employer but must have:
- Worked in Canada with a valid work permit for at least two years; and
- Met the requirements for language ability and education.
Currently, there is a surge on applications for Permanent Residence under the LCP and earlier this year, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration made a recommendation to the Government to end the backlog of LCP applications. With these plans in place, Caregivers waiting for their LCP applications to be finalized and be reunited with their families will soon get approvals on their applications.
To achieve this goal, the Honourable Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) made commitments on December 3, 2017, to reunite Caregivers and their families. These commitments will largely eliminate the inventory of LCP applications by the end of 2018, including:
- Finalizing a minimum of 80% of the cases that were in the LCP inventory as of October 1, 2017 by the end of 2018
- Processing 80% of new, complete LCP applications submitted on or after October 1, 2017 within 12 months; and
- Admitting high numbers of LCP Caregivers and their family members as Permanent Residents until the remaining cases are processed.
So far, great progress has been made on the backlog in recent years. As of October 1, 2017, there was a total of 63% reduction in the number of Caregivers and their family members waiting for their Permanent Residence applications to be finalized since reaching its highest level in May 2014.
Additional resources were dedicated by the IRCC this fall to process LCP applications and also to encourage Caregivers and their family members to submit any documents that were missing from their existing applications. With this focus, IRCC is on track to finalize 5,000 more cases than originally planned by the end of 2017. This will allow IRCC to welcome approximately 20,000 new Permanent Residents in the Caregiver category in total this year, reaching the high end of the target range as set out in the 2017 levels plan.
For more information on this topic, please click on https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2017/12/federal_governmentcontinuestomakefamilyreunificationapriority.html
