Omer Hafeez moved his family from the United Kingdom to Canada in August 2023. His wife is a health care worker. They came because the federal government said it wanted people like her.
The Hafeez family applied under the Home Care Workers pilot program on March 31, 2025. Then-immigration minister Mark Miller was clear in his press conference. He said the program would be the fastest of its kind. Done and dealt with in one year.
It is now April 2026. One year has passed.
"We have not even received the AOR," Hafeez said. "Work permits are expiring, and they have not given us any option to extend the work permits."
He has four children. Two are in primary school. One is in high school. His daughter is in her first year of university. The family does not know if she can stay enrolled next semester. His wife can no longer work. The IRCC processing time for their application now reads 88 months. That is more than seven years.
This is not a case of someone slipping through the cracks. Hafeez did everything right. He applied to a government program on the day it opened, based on a minister’s public promise. About 5,000 people are in the same pilot. They are all slowly reaching the end of their status, and none of them has heard anything.
Canada got what it wanted. In return, the Hafeez family got silence.
And they are not alone. More than 2.1 million temporary residents had permits expire in 2025. Another 1.9 million face the same this year. The government’s answer is a new Temporary Residency-to-Permanent Residency pathway offering 33,000 spots, with full details promised by April 2026. Those details have not been released as of mid-April.
An IRCC spokesperson didn’t explain why details haven't been released as promised, but instead focused on talking points about immigration levels targets.
"More details about the initiative will be shared in due time," said Mary Rose Sabater, communications advisor at IRCC.
In due time. That is the government’s answer to a family watching their work permits expire.
Lijing Cao, an immigration lawyer at Bellissimo Law Group in Toronto, said workers in Hafeez’s position have no automatic legal remedy. Ministerial promises, however public and however specific, don’t create a legal right to a pathway unless they’re formalized in law or regulation.
"Foreign workers may have a fairness-based argument, but they do not automatically have a legal right to the pathway simply because ministers announced that it was forthcoming," Cao said.
Their options right now are narrow.
Apply to extend before the permit expires and wait for an implied status. Seek a bridging open work permit if a PR application is already in progress. Apply for restoration within 90 days if the status has already lapsed. None of those options fixes the underlying problem. The government brought these workers in, made promises it hasn’t kept, and now tells them to manage their own status.
This is not an administrative delay. It is a policy failure that was predictable from the start.
Canada has been admitting temporary workers at a pace its permanent residency system was never built to absorb. In 2025, more than half of Canada’s 395,000 new permanent residents were already living here on temporary permits. The pipeline is real. The capacity is not.
"Fulfill your promises," Hafeez said. "If the minister has promised one thing, it should not be that if the minister has changed, that promise would not be fulfilled."
That is not an unreasonable thing to ask. The Hafeez family came here in good faith. They followed the rules. Three years later, they are still waiting and have no idea what happens next.
The government's response, when it finally came, was three words.
In due time is not an answer. It is an insult.
