Immigration Minister Marc Miller is being asked by The Association of Quebec Immigration Lawyers (AQAADI) to speed up family reunification immigration in the French province and get rid of “unreasonable delays” associated with the process.

“This processing schedule must be public, clear, orderly and reasonable for applications that already have a Quebec Selection Certificate issued,” said the letter sent to him on Friday.

The demands also include that eight individual applications get finalized within 30 days.

Miller is being threatened to be taken to federal court in case he does not come up with a written plan within the next two weeks, according to CBC News.

AQAADI claims that Quebec applicants wait twice or thrice the amount of time for their family reunification cases to processed in comparison to the rest of Canada.

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Quebec, unlike other Canadian provinces, picks its own annual immigration numbers and issues the Quebec Selection Certificate to the candidate it chooses.

The file is then passed on to the federal immigration department for regular processing.

Quebec’s family reunification program is capped at around 10,000 applicants every year, which is not in place for other Canadian provinces.

Miller said in March that he would double that number by bypassing the provincial cap, granting upward of 20,000 PRs.

Quebec let in 13,896 PRs under family sponsorship in 2021 and 12,904 in 2022. 2023 had further reduced that number to range between 10,200 and 10,600, which will be levelled until 2025.

As of February 1, 2024, over 43,000 are waiting for a Canada PR under Quebec’s family reunification program which is up from 38,000 as of October 1, 2023. The data comes from Quebec’s Immigration Ministry.

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Quebec spousal sponsorship applicants have a processing time of 34 months ahead of them at the time of application, compared to an average of 12 months for those in the rest of Canada. In December of last year, Quebec’s processing time was 42 months for spousal applicants.

For parents or grandparents, the sponsorship wait can stretch up to 50 months in the French province, while it half that long at 24 months in the rest of Canada.

Bahoz Dara Aziz, a spokesperson for the Immigration Minister, told CBC News that the Immigration Department is trying to reduce processing times.

“As announced by Minister Miller, we have started to increase the processing of family class applications destined to Quebec to slow down the growth of inventories and processing times relating to family reunification in that province,” he said.

“Given Quebec’s limiting of spaces, a backlog has accumulated over past years, this will take time to tackle, but we are dedicated to bringing families together in Quebec more quickly.”