An event was organized last month by the (CBIE) Canadian Bureau for International Education - The CBIE Pan-Canadaian Virtual Symposium- According to the event, Canadian immigration officials communicated that Canadian foreign enrolment snapped back rapidly from the disturbance of the covid-19 pandemic.

A director for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), Cynthia Ralickas, expressed the impact of covid-19 on their immigration programs in her statement, in which they have seen a solid recovery. She also added current study permit figures surpassed the pre-pandemic levels over 500,000 study permits being issued in 2021, and over 600,000 study permits being active in Canada. Kristy Greenslade, IRCC Senior Policy and Program Advisor, stated that the department received nearly 557,00 study permit applications in 2021 alone and represents a 56% increase in application volumes over 2020. She also noted 90,000 more study permit confirmations between 1 January and 30 April 2022- where a study permit confirmation demonstrates that the student has arrived in Canada. In the first four months of 2022, 65,200 study permits were granted for the students who had not yet arrived in Canada.

IRCC reported well-built application volumes again this year, as 175,000 study permit applications were received between January and March alone, which amounts to a 32% increase over the same period for 2022 before the pandemic had taken hold. In the last, she added that our numbers are consistently going up year after year.

The top authorship countries for study permit application in 2021 were Colombia, the Philippines, Nigeria, and India. These four countries accounted for 60% of all study permit applications in the first four months of 2022. This year again, India was particularly a supreme driver of overall growth. IRCC data displays that 621,565 study permits were carried by international students attending programs of at least six months in 2021- almost as many as before the pandemic in 2019 when the number of issued study permits was 638,380.

The rise in the volumes of study permit applications has played a significant role this year in a backlog of visa applications. As a result, the processing of applications is taking longer, and this has been a noteworthy issue for students planning to begin or continue their studies in Canada this year. Ms. Greenslade clarified that the current processing time for a study permit application is 80 days, which means applications are processed within that time frame.