The Canadian government is being sued over claims that it is illegally discriminating against people who have applied to bring their parents or grandparents into the country.

In a case that will come to court this month, Citizenship and Immigration Canada will have to answer charges that it has deliberately reduced resources for processing of parent and grandparent applications so that its target for this category is not met.

Processing times for parents and grandparents have ballooned to 10 years in many cases.

Lorne Waldman, the Toronto immigration lawyer who launched the lawsuit, said the government was illegally discriminating against a certain kind of immigration applicant. The suit is based on the case of Ming Chen, a Vancouver permanent resident who filed an application in July 2004 to sponsor his parents, but became concerned that the sponsorship would take as long as 10 years.

In a document filed with the lawsuit, Waldman said 100,000 parent and grandparent sponsorship cases are in the backlog and applicants are charged a $550 processing fee in advance, even though the files might not be opened for two years, and might not be processed for many more.

The suit claimed Immigration Department deliberately "managed downward" the target for parents and grandparents, and established quotas in offices overseas to restrict the number of visas issued in this category.

This plan was not made public, and the lawsuit alleges that the Immigration Department "made efforts to conceal the true state of the backlog and delay."

Documents filed with the suit show that beginning in 2002, the government changed its target for grandparents and parents to 6,000 from about three times that.