Sponsorship · Still in process
Long by design, and largely about the sponsor's income. The notes show which year's income assessment is the problem.
PGP files are among the longest-running in the system, and the assessment centres on whether the sponsor met the required income for the relevant tax years.
Income assessment happens against CRA records. If a year falls short or cannot be verified, the file can sit while that is resolved — often without any visible change to you.
Medicals for older applicants expire and need redoing, which adds silent months.
A long wait is not automatically a stalled wait. Rule these out first — several are things applicants genuinely miss.
IRCC publishes live processing times, and they change often — check the current time for Parents and Grandparents Program. We deliberately do not quote a number here, because any number we printed would be out of date within weeks.
This is the part almost nobody realises. You do not have to be refused to request your file. An application that is still in process has notes too — and for a file that has gone silent, they are usually the only way to find out what is actually happening.
If your notes contain any of these, the delay has a cause you can act on rather than simply wait out.
By far the most common one across every programme is the last kind: IRCC asked for something and never got a reply — often because the request went to an agent's email, or to an address the applicant no longer uses. The file then sits indefinitely, waiting on you.
Read the full escalation guide for stuck applications →
PGP files are among the longest-running in the system, and the assessment centres on whether the sponsor met the required income for the relevant tax years. Income assessment happens against CRA records. If a year falls short or cannot be verified, the file can sit while that is resolved — often without any visible change to you. Medicals for older applicants expire and need redoing, which adds silent months.
For an application still in process, the notes show what has been recorded so far: whether sponsor income has been assessed and for which tax years; whether an income shortfall or verification problem was recorded; medical status and expiry — critical for older applicants; admissibility notes, including any medical inadmissibility consideration; requests for updated financial evidence and whether they were answered. Your GCMS notes are a snapshot of what was recorded on your file at the time IRCC processed your request — not a live tracker. They will not give you a decision date. What they do give you is the truth about which stage your file actually reached, which checks are outstanding, and whether anything was asked of you that you never answered.
No. A Privacy Act request is handled by IRCC's ATIP unit, which is separate from the officers deciding your application. Requesting your own file is a legal right and it does not affect processing of the application itself.
Yes to both. Under the Privacy Act there is no fee to request your own personal information, and since July 2022 any person anywhere in the world can file directly, in their own name, with no representative in Canada required.
No, and anyone promising that is not telling you the truth. The notes will not contain a decision date. They tell you which stage your file genuinely reached, which checks are still outstanding, and whether IRCC asked you for something you never answered — which is often the real reason a file has stopped moving.
Confirm your Notices of Assessment for the relevant years are filed and accessible to CRA; Check whether medicals have expired and whether IRCC asked for new ones; Confirm the co-signer's details, if you used one, are correctly on file; Check the published processing time for the PGP intake year you applied under.
Your Parents & grandparents file has a written record. Requesting it from Canada is free and takes about twenty minutes — we publish every step, with a screenshot of every screen. If the notes come back and you cannot read them, send them to us.
