Canada Extends Medical Exemption for Some Immigration Applicants

The Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) will be renewing a temporary medical exemption on some immigration candidates who are applying for immigration from inside Canada until March 31, 2021. The existing medical exemption took effect in June and was set to expire on December 28, 2021.

For a foreign national to be able to apply for permanent resident, one must first present either an immigration medical exam or a unique medical identifier number that they got from their previous exam. This extended medical exemption allows the applicants to no longer have to do an additional medical exam, given that they have already completed one and that they met the following criteria:

• The applicant has already applied for permanent residency and has not completed a new immigration medical exam
• The applicant has either completed a medical exam within the last five years and found to create no risk to public health or complied with a requirement to report the health authorities for monitoring purposes.
• In the last year, the applicant has not left Canada for more than six months to live in a country that is listed on the government’s list of countries that requires an immigration

If a family member of an applicant also met the above-mentioned criteria, they may also be eligible to apply. If an individual did not qualify under this policy, the IRCC will contact them to discuss the next steps they have to do. This policy aimed to support faster immigration application processing. Currently, the department is facing a huge backlog in spite of the fact that they have reached their goal of landing 401,000 new immigrants this year.