ome-care workers arriving in Canada under a new pilot program will be granted permanent residence upon arrival in Canada. The new pilot program was announced in June of 2024 by Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marc Miller. It will begin shortly. The new initiative replaces the five-year pilot programs that ran from June 2019 to June 2024 to provide pathways to permanent residence for caregivers. In making the announcement, Miller described the new pilots as “enhanced”, with essentially a one-step to permanent residence for caregivers. Although the full details of the enhanced program have not yet been announced, it is widely anticipated that these initiatives will be less cumbersome and onerous for candidates to come to Canada and achieve permanent residence.
“Caregivers play a critical role in supporting Canadian families, and our programs need to reflect their invaluable contributions. As we work to implement a permanent caregivers program, these two new pilots will not only improve support for caregivers, but also provide families with the quality care they deserve.”
Info on eligibility, work experience, job offers
Click or tap here for much more information on the new programs and evolving changes that affect caregivers already in Canada, and those aspiring to come to Canada;
Call Upper Canada Immigration Consultants by phone or on WhatsApp at (647) 988-3846 to discuss your specific situation.
aregivers and support workers are in demand in Canada. If you are an international student, and you have completed your studies at a recognized, designated learning institution, the information on this web site may open an opportunity for you. If you are outside Canada and have relevant experience and education, you need to read this page. If you graduated within the past five years, and are a Hong Kong resident, there is a clear pathway to permanent residency in Canada for you.
How caregivers and support workers benefit
International students who have completed their studies at a recognized, designated learning institution, may apply for, and may be granted, a post-graduation work permit (PGWP) to work in Canada. You need to be clear on what full-time means, and how to qualify for Express Entry to Canada;
PSW students and caregivers whose post-graduation work permits average between one and two years, can benefit from new policies which lengthen the duration that they can legally accumulate Canadian work experience toward the Canadian Experience Class pathway to permanent residence;
Support workers and caregivers who are temporary residents in Canada (i.e. visitors) and are still in Canada under the temporary public policies enabling them to remain in Canada during the pandemic, and who wish to work as PSWs, will have a new (soon to be implemented pilot program) pathway to permanent residence to take;
Hong Kong residents who are recent graduates have, as of February 8, 2021, an opportunity to obtain open work permits for up to three years under a new public policy from the Government of Canada;
Support workers and caregivers who succeed in obtaining a LMIA-based work permit under the new conditions, after working for six (6) months at a minimum of 30 hours per week, may be eligible to apply for permanent residence for him or herself and their immediate family;
Foreign nationals not in Canada, and trained and experienced support workers, caregivers or nurses working anywhere in the world, can apply for permanent residence through the pilot program, if they have a job offer from a Canadian employer.
If you fall under at least one of the scenarios above, click or tap here for more information about the new opportunities to enable Personal Support Workers to qualify for Express Entry to Canada under recently-changed Canadian government programs and rules.
Ghost consultants are unregistered and unlicensed individuals masquerading as industry experts. They are ignorant of Canadian immigration law, rules, regulations and changing policies . They are usually much more expensive than legitimate and registered consultants, and when they vanish, they leave their victims out of money, out of time, and out of Canada. Beware of them!
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aking news in Canada every few months are cases such as a group of international students from the state of Punjab in India’s north. In that case, more than 700 such students faced deportation from Canada after Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) discovered that Letters of Admission from their education institutions were counterfeit. These fake Letters of Admission, issued in 2018 and 2019 by various institutions, were submitted as evidence in study permit applications on behalf of those students.
At the centre of that case was a now-defunct immigration ‘agency’ operating out of Punjab, whose owner-operator has since vanished. This ghost consultant had been charging aspiring international students thousands of dollars to assist in the process of obtaining admission into colleges in Canada and to apply for study permits. The students (and their parents) all claim to have been innocently duped by the “ghost” consultant who has now ghosted them.
These students, in addition to being fleeced of their family’s cash (apparently all the transactions were in cash) are being deported from Canada for misrepresentation, and also face a ban from applying to IRCC for at least five years. Similar cases include individuals in Canada on a visitor’s permit sent to work for Canadians without a work permit by employment agencies.
If you won’t spend the time and money to do it right, how will you find the time and the money do do it over?
Whether you are in India, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe or anywhere else, this is a cautionary tale. Its lesson is to stay away from ghosts. Use a real immigration consultant. We get it done right, and ironically, do your work faster and less expensively than the ghosts who vanish with both your money and your dreams. If an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is more detail on this web site.
The preferred pathway to immigration to Canada is through Express Entry. Draws from among the ‘pool’ of eligible candidates are made regularly. Contact us to get into the Express Entry pool.
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y far, Express Entry is the preferred route to Canada. By the end of 2025, Canada plans to accept some 1.45 million new residents. Canada’s Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration estimates the total breaks down as: 465,000 new residents in 2023; 485,000 in 2024; and 500,000 in 2025. While newcomers to Canada often often gravitate to urban areas, where many have friends and families to provide networking and social supports, the new plan contains numerous initiatives and regional pathways to encourage applicants to settle in Canadian small towns and rural areas. At Upper Canada Immigration Consultants, we assist many clients with getting into the Express Entry ‘pool.’
French-Speaking newcomers
In 2022 Canada received more than 16,300 Francophone newcomers to minority French-speaking communities across Canada. This is a marked increase in numbers from previous years, mostly because of targeted initiatives of both the federal government and provincial governments, (apart from Quebec which has its own immigration program).
All immigrants contribute to the rich tapestry of our cultural and linguistic profile. French-speaking immigrants are no exception. Canada, now in the final year of its five-year Action Plan for official languages, had allocated $40.7 million for Francophone immigration initiatives. To that end, and in setting its sights on improving that record number of French-speaking immigrants of last year, Canada has launched a targeted campaign to attract skilled French-speaking newcomers.
The Government of Canada has no ‘Visa Lottery.’ There is no such program that enables an applicant to ‘win’ a chance at immigration to Canada.
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ome time ago, we were receiving inquiries from individuals all over the globe, and particularly from Africa, about something called a new Canadian Visa Lottery Application that purportedly allows applicants a chance to come to Canada on a permanent resident visa.
I have reviewed the posts and links that people have sent me with Canadian Visa Lottery Application Form 2017/2018 and Canadian Visa Lottery Application Form 2018/2019. This is a scam.
This Canadian Visa Lottery scam is a deliberate attempt to mislead you. It is a fraudulent attempt by certain websites to mislead you, and obtain your personal data, obviously with questionable intent.
Please beware of any posts and websites that tell you there is a chance to ‘win’ permanent residency in Canada through a lottery-type system. The Government of Canada has no such program or initiative.
There are more than 60 programs of the Government of Canadian to facilitate access to Canada, whether for temporary residency, or permanent residency. Additionally, there are special programs, initiatives and pilots that are administered by Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial governments that will allow you, based on their own set of criteria, to legitimately come to Canada.
These, along with a solid and reputable consulting firm like Upper Canada Immigration Consultants, are the only authorities that can provide you a chance to come to Canada. Do not be misled by something that sounds too good to be true, because it likely is just that.
For more information on how you can come legitimately to Canada as a skilled professional, a skilled trade, a visitor, a student, a sponsored family member, or to overcome an immigration hurdle:
arch each year is Fraud Prevention Month in Canada. It’s an annual opportunity to remind those we work with to use caution in their immigration dealings. The Government of Canada has a very useful web page that echoes the regular messages we post on this web site, such as the cautionary message that follows. If somebody, or some supposed ‘program,’ sounds too good, or too easy, or too cheap to be real, then it almost certainly isn’t real. See what this site has to say about so-called ‘guarantees‘ to prospective newcomers to Canada.
Fake IELTS certificates
Sometimes, it is hard to believe the brazen gall of a crooked scheme unless you read it yourself! One of our staff, on an e-mail account not associated with Upper Canada Immigration, received an e-mail solicitation just flat-out offering to sell anyone an IELTS certificate. Here was the e-mail title: High-quality Original IELTS certificate for sale.
You have to be kidding! A mail-order fake IELTS certificate is about as brazen a scam as we’ve yet seen. We have a page on this web site about common types of fraud that criminals worldwide try to perpetrate against people applying to be legitimate immigrants to Canada. As our web page states clearly, consultants like us provide advice to clients on each and every document they will require, and then we check each and every document we submit on behalf of our clients. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) independently verifies each document in every application all over again.
Criminal offense
Uttering a forged document means altering or creating a document in order to commit fraud, without the knowledge of the proper authorizing party, in this case IELTS. Uttering a forged document is a criminal offence in Canada, illegal under Section 368 of the Criminal Code of Canada. The odds of a fake IELTS certificate working for you are zero! The chances of a fake IELTS certificate sinking your application are 100 percent. And you commit a crime in Canada if you try it.
Mail order IELTS certificates are a way to get the stupid, the dishonest and the gullible to part with their hard-earned money in return for nothing but a guarantee of failure.
ews articles in Canada in the past year have focused on the immigration challenge facing western democracies. Populism and nativism, amplified in volume well beyond the number of their advocates by strident social media and flat-out cyber manipulation by totalitarian nations (who, ironically are among the world’s most xenophobic) make dispassionate and rational discussions of the clear benefits of immigration to a country like Canada more difficult for the necessity of trying to speak clearly and calmly amid the noise of hysteria.
We are all, rightly, most concerned about our own situation, and whether we can succeed. Here is a view of the broader immigration landscape.
As authors, the two Canadians are walking ground opened up by the late Swedish statistician Hans Rosling (1948 – 2017) in the YouTube video of his lecture on global population growth. It is a superb one-hour production. Click below to see it.
Update: Rosling was right
Nothing Ibbitson and Bricker’s book, or Rosling’s video, have to say is all that startling, fact by immutable fact. It is the assembling of the larger picture, and projecting it over the entire globe, and the complete 21st century, that make all the data so eye-opening. In 2007, the number of people, worldwide, living in cities surpassed the number in rural or remote areas. Cities are indisputably the 21st century’s engines of growth and repositories of people and knowledge.
The Globe’s Ibbitson published a July 2020 update here. Ibbitson lists some countries that stand to lose more than half their population by the end of the century. The BBC News web site has an article about the implications of a shrinking population, and why global population shifts may be encouraging news for prospective newcomers to Canada.
Nations that have not pursued forward-thinking immigration programs already see their populations in decline. Examples include Japan, Russia, and countries in eastern Europe;
As populations of youth and people in their prime working years decline or stagnate, proportions of seniors in nearly all western nations are rising sharply. Some 90 percent of health care expenses are spent on the old and the chronically ill. This leaves taxpayer-borne expenses such as health care and pensions to be paid by fewer and fewer working age people;
China, which discourages inbound immigration, will see its own population level off shortly, and begin a long decline;
Urbanization leads to better education for women, with families starting their child-bearing years later, and having fewer children. The birth date falls below the rate of replacement (depending on who calculates it, between 2.2 and 2.7 babies per woman of child-bearing years);
The very policies that welcome newcomers run into opposition in older societies, where a graying older generation can’t – or won’t – connect the dots between a healthy level of immigration, and the people they themselves will need to build their homes, manage their communities, and become their doctors, for example.
Most demographic studies put the world’s population peak at between eight and 11 billion, sometime in the middle of this century, then beginning a steady decline. Canada, with its decades of careful, but generous, immigration numbers remains younger than the average nation. Canada has the ability to keep growing without the looming brick wall of worker shortages facing other nations (such as Japan and even the USA).
Canada’s current 41 million people will grow to some 50 million by mid-century, roughly the end of the lives of North America’s ‘baby boom’ generation born after World War II, between 1946 and 1966. Come and work with us. Each year, some 350,000 people will move from the land of their birth to start a new life in Canada. Competition for each of those spots is tight, and the requirements mean you need to have a plan, act on it, and not make mistakes. Contact us. We can help.
New measures to reunite family class applicants faster and provide work permits are now in place. Contact us for a consultation on WhatsApp. Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
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ndividuals sponsored by their spouses or family members to come to Canada as permanent residents will receive much faster service for processing a Temporary Resident Visa (TRV) to travel to Canada. This comes after recent changes announced by the Government of Canada. Newly implemented measures benefit those sponsored by their Canadian resident or Canadian citizen spouses and by family members, if they were outside Canada at the time their application was submitted. If your application is already in the system, here is what you may want to do now to reunite with your family member:
Apply for a temporary resident visa (TRV) to travel to Canada to be with the spouse while a permanent resident application is processed;
Apply for an open work permit (OWP), once in Canada, and integrate into the workforce while an application for permanent residence is processed.
Faster service standard
TRV applications of spouses will be processed within 30 days. To expedite the processing of work permits of spouses and dependents who are already in Canada, the the promise is for processing to be completed within 60 days of submission. Processing of both applications (consecutively) is expected to take approximately three months to complete.
Once an (outside Canada) spousal or family class application has been submitted, a TRV application can immediately be submitted. When the principal applicant has received a visitor visa, and has arrived in Canada, an open work permit can then be submitted. IRCC’s service standard for finalizing spousal application processing is 12 months.
What has changed?
Previously, individuals living outside Canada at the time of their sponsorship by their spouses and family members remained in their country of residence until they were granted permanent residence. Even though sponsored individuals were eligible to apply for a TRV while they waited for their final decision, the approval rate for such applications was very low. Also, applying for an OWP was only available to sponsored spouses if they were already living in Canada and even then, it was not possible until the first stage in the processing of their application was finalized and the approval in principle letter was issued.
Why the change was made
The newly implemented measures strengthen existing measures to reunite family members faster. The measures also address labour shortages in Canada by broadening the eligibility factor for OWP applicants. Those eligible for a TRV and an OWP under the spousal pathway, include dependents of the principal applicant. When an application for permanent residence has been submitted under the family class reunification program, either an open work permit application may be submitted by the sponsored party and eligible dependents from within Canada, or a TRV may be submitted by the sponsored party and dependents that are outside Canada.
New processing tools
The increased efficiency level and increased approval rate for spousal TRV applications stems from the implementation and use of new and dedicated processing tools by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) for such applications. The streamlining and processing of information submitted by applicants in their applications means that the processing time of TRVs now averages 30 days, with an approval rate of around 93 percent.
Who can be sponsored
If you are a citizen of Canada with a child who was born outside Canada, your child may already be a citizen, and therefore cannot be sponsored. Contact us for help to determine the status of your child, and to determine whether or not sponsorship is necessary.
Spouses: A permanent resident or citizen of Canada can sponsor his or her spouse, common law partner or conjugal partner to come to Canada as a permanent resident.
Dependants: Children who are under the age of 22 and are either unmarried or not in a common-law relationship and whose parents are either permanent residents or citizens can be sponsored. If a dependent child is over 22 years old, there must be evidence that the child is dependent on the parents for financial support because of a mental or physical disability. It must also be established that the financial support started before the age of 22 and is ongoing.
Expedited temporary resident pathway for Ukrainians
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mmigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, as of March 17, 2022, launched an emergency measure to assist those fleeing the war in Ukraine. The Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) is a special expedited temporary resident pathway for Ukrainian citizens and their family members to come to Canada where they will be safe for as long as three years. This is not a refugee stream.
Under this emergency measure, Ukrainians and their immediate family members, regardless of those members’ nationality, may come to Canada as temporary residents. At the time of submitting their applications, such individuals are also encouraged to apply for open work permits. IRCC is expected to process such applications within two weeks, ensuring that the integrity of various processes to authenticate documents and verify facts are not compromised. Standard background checks and thorough screening will be conducted on applicants before final decisions are rendered.
Ukrainians outside Canada
The application process for individuals outside Canada involves an online application submission and enrollment in the biometrics registry. Applications can be submitted online from anywhere in the world, and biometrics enrolment can be done at any functioning VAC office outside of Ukraine. Such offices can be found in Austria, Poland, Romania and Moldova. VAC offices in Chisinau, Warsaw, Vienna and Bucharest have already been expanded to facilitate increased demand for services.
To facilitate continuity of services for Ukrainians and biometrics enrollment, IRCC has relocated staff, moved supplies and deployed mobile biometrics collection units to strategic locations in Europe. As well, all railway travel for Ukrainians to get to VAC offices and such strategic points in Europe is free of charge. Several application requirements such as processing fees for TRV applications (visitor or work permits) fees have been waived.
More information and FAQs
There is lots more information on how Ukrainians needing refuge can find it in Canada. Check out our web page with more detailed information and frequently-asked questions.
Students can work with us to obtain study permits and TRVs to travel to Canada to begin, or continue, their study programs. Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
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tudents planning to start school in Canada have fewer barriers to travelling than the previous two years. Immigration, Refugees and Citizen Canada (IRCC) has reverted to its usual procedures in issuing study permits by issuing an approval letter and a temporary resident visa (student) for travelling to Canada. Students, upon arrival at a port of entry are subject to an examination by the CBSA, whereupon they can be refused entry, if it is found that information is questionable, or not bona fide. After examining a student and once the officer is satisfied, a secure document, referred to a “study permit” is issued, bearing the issue and expiry dates.
To resume their programs and restore revenue generation mechanisms, educational institutions have developed on-line studies as part of their offering to students, both local and abroad. Recognizing the lengthy processing periods for study permit applications, students must begin their groundwork on obtaining key documents in their respective countries for their applications, months ahead of their semester start dates. And more importantly, students must contact us for assistance as soon as they make a decision that they want to come to Canada to study. We will provide advice, insight and guidance on the process.
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