Your visa is taking longer than expected

The most common reason a Canadian visa feels slow is that it is not actually late. IRCC's published figure for a visitor visa from India is currently 29 days, and IRCC states that its times are "not a maximum or a guarantee", so passing that figure is normal rather than a fault in your file. The number is a median, which means half of all applications take longer than it by definition. Silence is not a signal either. IRCC contacts you by mail, email or through your account if it needs anything more, so hearing nothing usually means nothing is outstanding on your side and there is nothing for you to do. If you are past the published time and have still heard nothing at all, IRCC's web form is the route to ask about it.

First check whether it has actually been 3 weeks of working days rather than calendar days, because most people are counting the wrong thing. UKVI states that "Processing times are based on the UK working week (Monday to Friday)", which makes the standard about 15 working days. A calendar count therefore puts you roughly a week ahead of the real deadline, and a great deal of the anxiety on this route comes from that single arithmetic difference. Beyond that, UKVI publishes its own list of reasons an application takes longer, and it says it will contact you within the processing time if yours will exceed it. So no contact is itself information. If you are genuinely past the time and have not been contacted, UKVI's guidance is to contact them. Count the working days first, and most of the time the question answers itself.

It depends on which country, and the two work quite differently. For Canada, sign in to your IRCC secure account or use the Client Application Status tool, and you will see the status once you have an acknowledgement of receipt with your application number on it. For the UK, you cannot: UKVI states that if your application is still within the current processing times, "We will not be able to provide information on the status of your application." There is no tracker to refresh and nobody to ring. In both cases the decision itself reaches you directly, by letter or by email, so there is no state in which you have been approved and nobody has told you. Waiting without news is the normal shape of this, not a sign something has gone wrong.

The progress bar does not show how far along your application is, and this is the single most misread thing in the process. IRCC states that the bar "shows how long it may take to process your application. The bar and estimated dates are based on the date we received your application and our processing times. It isn't based on your application's progress." Read that carefully, because it inverts what everybody assumes. So the bar moving, or an estimated date suddenly jumping forward or backward, tells you that IRCC's published times changed for everybody. It tells you nothing whatsoever about your file, whether an officer has opened it, or how close a decision is. Watching it daily is a way to feel worse without learning anything. The only reliable signals are a request for documents and the decision itself, and both of those arrive in your inbox rather than on a bar.

You should almost never reapply because an application is taking too long, and doing so can make things worse rather than better. A second application does not replace the first. It joins the same queue behind it, both are processed, and you pay the fees again for the privilege. For Canada there is a further trap: reapplying means you need a new biometric instruction letter, and IRCC warns that using an old one may delay the application or get it refused outright. So the manoeuvre intended to save time can cost you both applications. If you genuinely need a decision faster, the honest options are narrow: the UK's paid priority services where your route and country are eligible, or accepting the timeline and planning the trip around it. Withdrawing and refiling is not a shortcut either, since the new file starts at the back of today's queue rather than keeping your place.