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Canada’s changing immigration program
Canada’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is keeping busy with country-wide consultations on immigration levels and the mix of immigrants.
Generally when we are talking about the immigration mix, we are speaking about the percentage of intake between the economic, family or humanitarian/refugee categories. But from a processing perspective, the mix can also be considered as between permanent and temporary immigration.
In the past decade, there has been a shift towards temporary immigration streams while permanent migration has remained relatively static.
Statistics for the past ten years (between 2002 – 2012) show that permanent migration has remained constant at approximately 250,000 immigrants per year.
Prior to the global recession in 2008, Canada had been experiencing strong economic growth coupled with a shortage of both skilled and unskilled workers.
Levels of foreign workers had been steadily increasing.
At the same time, Canada's educational institutions had been attracting foreign students in greater numbers.
While this was occurring, government researchers were seeing that people who had worked, studied and lived in Canada prior to becoming permanent residents.
Concurrently, Canada was also experiencing a tremendous backlog in permanent residence applications.
By 2008 a backlog of nearly 1 million applications was clogging our system with processing times taking up to nearly ten years for some cases.
In February of 2008 the government announced that the Skilled worker program - Canada's cornerstone immigration program - would be restricted to certain identified occupations.
The initial phase of the newly restricted program listed 38 eligible occupations which was further restricted to 29 occupations in 2010, with the program finally being completely shut down in June of 2012.
It has only recently re-opened in April of this year and only 24 occupations are eligible to participate in the skilled worker program.
On the business side of things Canada's entrepreneur and investor programs have both been closed for several years while the government continues to process those applications previously submitted.
These changes and suspensions to several of the categories of immigration have allowed Canada immigration to clean up the backlog of applicants already in the system and maintain annual processing targets of approximately 250,000 immigrants per year.
Catherine Sas ([email protected]) is a practicing immigration lawyer based in Vancouver. For more information go to www.canadian-visa-lawyer.com.
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