Family Class Sponsorship

The Family Class Sponsorship application is available if you are a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident living in Canada, and you want to sponsor close family members living abroad, including:

If you are a Permanent Resident of Canada or a Canadian citizen, you are eligible to sponsor your spouse to Canada. You will need to provide strong documentation with respect to the genuineness of your relationship. You can file an inland or overseas Spousal Sponsorship application. Depending on your circumstances, you should consider the differences of both applications so that you can determine which option best suits your circumstances.

If you have been living together in a conjugal relationship for at least one year in an ongoing 12-month period (you are allowed short absences for business travel or family reasons) then you may be eligible to sponsor your common law partner.

This category is for partners either of the opposite sex or same sex in situations beyond their control that keep them from living together so they would count as common-law partners or spouses. A conjugal relationship is more than a physical relationship. It means you depend on each other, there is some permanence to the relationship, and there is the same level of commitment as a marriage or a common-law partnership.

Many Provincial Nomination Programs (PNPs) have Family Class sponsorship categories. This is a separate category of federal sponsorship. If you are a resident of any of these provinces then you may be eligible to sponsor your family members.

Another option is the Parent and Grandparent sponsorship. Citizenship and Immigration Canada will re-open the Parent and Grandparent (PGP) program for new applications on January 2, 2015, by which time the backlog and wait times in the program are expected to have been cut in half.