Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has paused the Parents and Grandparents Program (PGP) as of July 15, 2026, stopping both new expressions of interest and the issuance of invitations to apply. The official IRCC sponsorship page confirms the pause took effect that day, and the department says it will not accept new formal expressions of interest until further notice.

The pause was put in place through Ministerial Instructions 89 — a tool the immigration minister can use to set operational rules for specific program streams without going through Parliament. An IRCC notice published July 15, 2026, titled "Canada takes steps to responsibly manage the Parents and Grandparents Program," addresses the measure directly.

Taous Ait, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab, described the decision as part of broader efforts to restore balance across immigration programs and maintain public confidence. That framing places the PGP suspension within the government's wider immigration-levels reductions, which have lowered permanent resident targets across multiple streams.

The 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan cut the PGP target to 15,000 new permanent residents per year for each of the three years. The previous 2025–2027 plan had set the 2025 target at 21,500. Despite the pause on new intakes, IRCC will continue processing up to 15,000 individuals in 2025 who have already applied, consistent with the levels plan.

The backlog context matters here. IRCC set up a pool system for PGP expressions of interest in 2020, receiving more than 200,000 responses that year. Think of it as a raffle: people submit their interest, and IRCC draws names from the pool to invite them to apply. As of September 2025, roughly 54,000 expressions of interest from that original 2020 pool were still waiting. As of July 2026, 60,500 applications for permanent residence under the PGP were in progress — a separate stream of work on top of the unprocessed pool.

The gap between the 54,000 remaining expressions of interest and the 15,000 annual processing allocation shows the scale of the inventory problem. At current processing levels, clearing the existing pool alone would take roughly three and a half years, assuming no new applications are added and processing keeps pace with targets.

The government had signalled a different direction as recently as a year earlier. On July 16, 2025, IRCC published a notice titled "Parents and Grandparents Program intake opens in late July," indicating the department was preparing to accept new submissions. That intake apparently went ahead, but the current pause reverses course, closing the program to new interest again.

NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan noted that the PGP has remained closed to new intakes since 2020 and criticized the government for once again suspending new submissions. Her criticism points to a political tension: the program's operational reality has been one of near-continuous closure, even as successive governments have periodically signalled openings that either did not materialize or were quickly reversed.

The broader context here is the government's effort to manage immigration volumes against capacity constraints across processing, settlement, and public-facing pressures. The PGP has been a persistent pressure point because family reunification carries strong political and emotional resonance, particularly among communities where multi-generational settlement is a cultural expectation. Cutting PGP targets and pausing intake is a politically costly step, which suggests the government's assessment of processing capacity and inventory management has overridden those considerations.

For practitioners and advocates, the immediate practical consequence is that no new sponsors can enter the expression-of-interest pool, and those already in it face continued uncertainty about when their files will be drawn. The 54,000 remaining expressions of interest represent individuals who have been waiting since 2020 or earlier. The combination of the 15,000 annual cap and the indefinite pause on new submissions means that pool will be drawn down slowly, with no mechanism for new applicants to join the queue.

The use of Ministerial Instructions rather than a regulatory or legislative change is consistent with how IRCC has managed PGP intake adjustments in the past. Ministerial Instructions let the department move quickly without amending the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations, though they remain subject to review by the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. Whether the current pause will face committee scrutiny is an open question.