It's ironic that I just got this e-mail an hour after writing the last post. It's not good news, for sure. I mean, we'll still get there, just later rather than sooner. Now I'm starting to think, will Kennedy be home for Christmas?This message has been sent to families in the process of adopting from China.
As everyone who has called, who listens in on China adoption chat groups, or who is watching the CCAA website knows, the wait times from login date to child proposal has been steadily increasing. With the child proposals that CCAA will issue at the beginning of April, the wait time will have increased to 11 months.
The April proposals that are about to come will be for dossiers with login dates a few days after May 26 -- the child proposals will not reach into June.
The difficulty that CCAA faces is that last year there was a huge increase in the rate at which applications were submitted -- the rate apparently peaked in Spring 2005. The monthly submission rate last Spring exceeded the monthly rate at which paper-ready children are now coming into the system. Hence a queue is building just outside the matching room even though the number of children being matched each month remains more or less constant.
This phenomenon happened about 6 years ago. At the time, LID-to-referral was reasonably fast as 7 to 8 months. This quick track time attracted a larger number of applicants than CCAA had children in the program. Wait times increased a year later to 13 - 14 months. To get back to a balance between applications and paper-ready children, CCAA imposed a limit on the number of applications that agencies could submit (Canadian agencies were spared but others including the US agencies were restricted) and at the same time, the long wait times discouraged many families from applying to China. The submission rate dropped and about two years later, CCAA was able to clear the backlog and remove the agency submission quotas. Everyone saw wait times decreasing. Eventually they dropped to about six months which was the situation for about a year and a half up to last Summer. The short wait times attracted more families to the program which led to the high submission rate last year.
It has taken CCAA three months to clear May 2005 dossiers and we expect it is likely that it will take something like that for June dossiers -- perhaps, May, June, and July. If this happens, the wait time will have increased to 13 months. Without quantitative information, it is very hard to guess how long it will take for CCAA to move through the July, August 2005 and later LID dossiers. In any case, we expect that the wait time will be a minimum of 14 months and very likely longer.for families whose dossiers were either submitted recently or will be submitted in the next few months.
In summary, the discouraging news is that wait times are long, are increasing, and will continue to increase at least for next few months. However, the rumours that CCAA is /deliberately slowing down/ placing fewer children/ preparing to cancel the program/ because of /political reasons/ the 2008 Olympic games/ embarrassment/ are built on speculations.
Bob
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