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> was six months of waiting with no feedback at all from the IRCC about where the process is stuck.

Since most governments went WFH, application processes for everything have, in my experience, gone to insane lengths. I don’t think the government union culture and WFH mixed well.

How do you perform correlation implies causation on this?

I am Canadian and the government actually said a couple of times that WFH employees were more efficient.

That’s great, but have you tried interacting with government to confirm yourself? It is unbelievable how long it takes to deal with CRA these days, or get a building permit for something as simple as a deck returned. Wait times are massively longer than they were pre-COVID.

> It has been a total shitshow. I started the process in June of 2022, eventually the team I was moving to got bored of waiting for the work permit in March 2023.

Someone did something very wrong. The wait time for a temporary work permit from the US is a whole 5 weeks.

I've done this, the process was very transparent and predictable.

Compared to the US system it's amazing.

That was my impression as well until my first-hand experience. In comparison, a colleague started the transfer process to the US 2 months after I started with Canada and left to the US in 2 months after that.

It has not been a good experience with me and has soured my impression of Canada tremendously.

Even if only 0.1% of IRCC applications slipped through the cracks, that would still be hundreds of cases like yours annually.

Well most immigrants into Canada aren't coming from US so the wait times are small. Tech immigrants mostly come from India and China, where the waiting times range from 3 months atleast upto a year and a half.

The Canadian immigration policy is not what's on paper, really it's determined by funding. IRCC is understaffed and recently went on strike over pay and stuff. The funding level is giving the Canadian government a way to eat their cake and have it, too. Write a liberal immigration policy on paper, limit immigration by not having staff to process all the paperwork.

> Factoring out the (ridiculous) 3 months it took for the relocation agency to prepare and submit my work permit application

Taking that long, brings into mind the possibility that you used an incompetent agency. Thus, maybe they also filled the actual application badly, and then the Canadian authorities had problems interpreting and processing your application.

Maybe this all can be explained by an incompetent agency, and not faults in the actual Canadian system.

I have a lot of bad things to say about my experience with that agency indeed.

However, this doesn’t excuse never answering official inquiries and being wholly uncooperative. And even a rejection would have been better than the radio silence and apathy I have experienced.

Any thing bureaucratic in Canada takes longer than you could possibly imagine. Very frustrating when you are relying on it.

my work visa got approved very fast

I think they (whoever applied on your behalf) did something wrong with your application

I did mine myself and my company had someone at IRCC to confirm everything was correct, then I submitted, it took if much 2 months for my approval