What Does This Mean for Applicants?

Canada Immigration Forum (discussion group)


 
       
Subject: What Does This Mean for Applicants?
  The Present

Most would agree that Canada´s present immigration system is badly in need of an overhaul. There are currently about 600,000 economic immigrants waiting in line for assessment and it will be years before many of them set foot in Canada. Who is to blame for this backlog depends on whom you ask. Conservatives and Liberals point to each other and in fact they are both right. Their parties have been in power, at one time or another since 2002, when Canadian immigration law was last modified. That law does provide for a regulator (raising/lowering the pass mark) to control the number of applicants under the Federal Skilled Worker category, but neither party had the political guts to set the bar higher, for fear of alienating Canadian ethnic communities. They do vote, after all.

During the last Parliament, the Conservative government pushed through legislation that gives sweeping powers to the Minister of Immigration. This new authority includes the ability to prioritize and even to exclude categories and classes of immigrants. The Conservatives recently stated that they will await the election results before announcing exactly how they will wield this new power to trim the backlog. There are two things you can bet on. One is that, if elected, they will exercise their new clout, and the other is that if their planned strategy was good news for Canada´s ethnic communities, it would have been publicized during the run up to this election.

The Future

Critics have stated that, if elected, the Conservatives will shut the door on, or at least significantly reduce the intake of newcomers to Canada. I disagree. The party´s roots may be planted in anti-immigration soil but the Conservative leader is crafty bright, and he realizes that it will be very difficult to achieve his goal of displacing the Liberals as the natural party of Canadians without gaining the trust of the ethnic communities.

Rather than curtailing the number of newcomers, the Conservatives plan to off-load the selection of immigrants to the provinces and territories. This fits with the Conservative philosophy of recognizing that the regions know their respective needs better than the government based in Ottawa. Moreover, it would permit a more even spread of newcomers throughout Canada and this too is their stated goal. So while the overall number of yearly immigrants may not decrease under a Conservative mandate, the process of qualifying to come to Canada will certainly change.


What Does This Mean for Applicants?

In my opinion, the days of the Federal Skilled Worker Program, as we know it, are numbered. That "one size fits all" approach to the selection of economic immigrants will be shunted aside in favour of selection by the way of Provincial Nomination Programs and Quebec. I doubt that the Federal Skilled Worker Program will entirely disappear, but what will remain will be a skeleton if its former self. Rumor has it, that to qualify, an applicant will need "Arranged Employment" in Canada, aka, a Canadian job or work experience in one of only 38 "open occupations". This is a far cry from the relative ease with which one can now qualify, that is, by scoring 67 points and having worked for at least one year in any skilled occupation.

What seems certain, is that the Canadian immigration process is about to become more complicated. There are currently more than 50 sub-categories of province-based immigration. Many, but not all, of these programs include a requirement for a job in the province in order to qualify. Other provincial programs give a boost to applicants with more distant relatives in that province. One thing is sure; a lot more research will be required of applicants in order to choose the most efficient path to a new life in Canada.

[30-09-2008,05:13]
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