Thousands of Start-Up Visa applicants have waited years without explanation. The application was filed, the fees were paid, and then nothing.<\/p>\n
An internal IRCC email released under the Access to Information Act answers the question in the department’s own words. The answer is not what most applicants assume.<\/p>\n
Your application was not refused, and it was not assessed. It never entered the processing queue at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n In IRCC’s system there is an intermediate step between filing an application and any officer reviewing it, called promotion<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The department describes the sequence this way: every PR economic application must first be reviewed for completeness. Once it is assessed as complete under R10, the application is promoted and put into processing.<\/p>\n Before that step, the file exists in the system but is not in any review queue. The email calls this state prospective inventory<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The email sets out a chronology:<\/p>\n Before March 2020:<\/strong> completeness checks and promotion were done first-in-first-out, as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n 2020:<\/strong> the office closed for several months and paper applications went unreviewed. After reopening, seating was limited and priority went to other lines of business and to in-Canada clients. The email states directly that this is where the backlog in SUV promotion time begins<\/strong>.<\/p>\n 2021:<\/strong> the Senior Assistant Deputy Minister introduced an internal commitment to complete, promote and issue acknowledgement letters within a defined timeline for certain lines of business. SUV was not included<\/strong>, and was reviewed only when capacity allowed.<\/p>\n Spring 2023:<\/strong> a requirement was introduced that all members of an entrepreneurial team be processed at the same time. Files therefore had to be grouped rather than worked strictly in order \u2014 a manual task that, in the email’s words, takes more time than working FIFO<\/strong>.<\/p>\n April 2024:<\/strong> new Ministerial Instructions introduced priority processing for certain SUV application types. This moved the office further from FIFO, and, as the email puts it, older applications would only be reviewed after all priority applications<\/strong>.<\/p>\n January 2025:<\/strong> the decisive step. Offices were asked what resources they needed to meet their assigned targets. Because there are no transfer targets for SUV in 2025 or 2026, no resources were allocated to the completeness check and promotion of SUV prospective inventory<\/strong>.<\/p>\n March 2025:<\/strong> the intake office lost a significant share of its resources in the budget realization exercise.<\/p>\n The reasoning is set out in the email and is circular in an entirely logical way. The office that makes the final SUV decision \u2014 the Economic Immigration Operations Division \u2014 already has enough inventory<\/strong>. It therefore does not need more files transferred to it from the Centralized Intake Office.<\/p>\n And if no transfer is needed, there is no reason to completeness-check and promote new applications.<\/p>\n The email is explicit: completeness checking and promotion happen only when files are needed to support admission targets, and for SUV there was already more than sufficient inventory promoted and ready for processing<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Where a delay has passed the point of reasonableness, an application for mandamus in the Federal Court compels the department to decide. This email matters in such cases as the department’s own record of why files are not moving.<\/p>\n Internal IRCC correspondence, subject “SUV Inventory – Unpromoted Applications”, released under the Access to Information Act, document 1A-2025-08985-000016.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thousands of Start-Up Visa applicants have waited years without explanation. The application was filed, the fees were paid, and then nothing. An internal IRCC email released under the Access to Information Act answers the question in the department’s own words. The answer is not what most applicants assume. Your application was not refused, and it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-immigration-to-canada-en","category-immigration-to-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22653"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22751,"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22653\/revisions\/22751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avalvisa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What “promotion” means<\/h2>\n
The chain of decisions<\/h2>\n
Why the transfer target is zero<\/h2>\n
What this means in practice<\/h2>\n
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Source<\/h2>\n
Related reading<\/h2>\n
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