Christians refer to the week leading up to Easter as ‘Holy Week,’ commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus. Easter Season, begins on Easter Sunday, and lasts seven weeks, ending with the coming of the 50th day, Pentecost Sunday.
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aster Sunday is normally a high point in the global Christian, and especially Roman Catholic calendars. Easter is Sunday April 20 in 2025. Easter is a celebration of resurrection after death and of eternal life. Christians around the world join in prayer to ask God’s help that the globe’s people everywhere may prosper. Easter is also associated with the coming of spring, the warming of the weather and the longer days after the end of the cold of winter. Easter is also traditionally time for people in North America to put away their winter clothes and dress in bright colours again.
We may not be celebrating in church among many other worshipers, but to all our Christian clients and friends this year, a Happy Easter, with the blessings and renewal that the warmth of spring brings.
Our offices will be closed from 6:00 p.m. Thursday April 17 through to 9:00 a.m. Monday April 21.
Though we will not be manning the phones during Easter weekend, we will be checking e-mail. As well, you can leave us a text message any time by clicking here.
Andrea Seepersaud
President
Upper Canada Immigration Consultants
anada has significantly changed the Federal Skilled Worker Program, adding a new category – Education – and removing some job titles and NOC codes under other categories while adding other job titles under existing categories. The Federal Skilled Worker Program is a pathway to permanent residence for foreign nationals with, among other qualifying factors, strong education, work experience and language competency.
The landscape has changed
Many Canadian teachers were born during the ‘baby-boom’ era, and are rapidly leaving the classroom to retire. This opens opportunities for teachers educated and experienced outside Canada to continue their classroom teaching careers in Canada.
If you are serious about coming to Canada, you will want to review the changes to the Federal Skilled Worker Program. There are entire categories of jobs in both the skilled trades and in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) career streams that are no longer in demand. The same applies to skilled trades. Some new job titles will receive priority, and others are deprecated. There is a whole new career stream open to you if you are a teacher.
he newHome Care Worker Immigration Pilots first announced in June 2024, are now poised to start on March 31, 2025. This will make it easier for 2,750 home care workers and home child care workers to become permanent residents. Details released on February 26 and March 8, indicate that it will be much easier for workers to find jobs within the home care sector, through a wider range of employers. There will be two streams of these pilots: workers who are already in Canada and those who are not yet in Canada.
Workers in Canada Stream
When the pilots opened on March 31, 2025, people were ready to submit their applications to the Workers in Canada stream. Within five hours – by 3:00 pm that same day, the program had reached its full quotas of 2550 for each of two sections (child care and home support) of the stream. At the time of writing this article, the alternate sub sections of both streams with 150 spots each were still open to accepting applicants. There is still no news about a date for opening the program for applicants outside Canada. For those potential applicants, patience and keeping updated is imperative to being able to submit an application when the time comes to do so. IRCC has indicated that it will open at a later date, and not that it has been shelved or been paused indefinitely. These pilots are highly popular and ridiculously over-subscribed. Thus, preparation and agility at the computer keyboard as soon as the program opens are key elements to submission success. Those who missed the opportunity on March 31, of which there are thousands, must wait until January 2026 for another chance to submit an application through the HCWIP.
Applicants who are eligible for the pilots and submitted their application for the In-Canada, stream will obtain permanent residence for themselves and their family. In fact, their applications will be submitted for permanent residence in one step. For this pilot, obtaining qualifying Canadian work experience is no longer a prerequisite for permanent residence.
Eligibility criteria
Applicants must demonstrate that they have achieved a Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB) or Niveaux de Competence linguistique Canadiens (NCLC) level of 4;
Applicants must have six months of recent relevant work experience from anywhere in the world, or have completed a credential of six months duration in a related home care training;
Applicants must have a full-time job offer from an employer anywhere in Canada, except Quebec;
Applicants must have the equivalent of a Canadian high school diploma.
Potential employers
Private households;
Organizations that hire full-time workers to provide short-term or occasional home care to individuals who are recovering from injury or illness and those who live independently but rely on some level of home care; Such organizations may employ workers as:
Home health care service providers;
Home care support service providers;
Direct care agencies;
Personal care services in residential settings;
Pediatric home health care service providers.
In Canada without status
If you are in Canada without status, but meet the eligibility criteria above, you may be eligible under a special temporary policy to apply. There will be 150 spots (reserved from 2,750 ) under this policy. Contact Upper Canada Immigration Consultants to learn more.
Home Care Worker Immigration Pilots start March 31
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ome-care workers arriving in Canada under a new initiative “Home Care Worker Immigration Pilots” will be granted permanent residence upon arrival in Canada. The new pilot programs were announced in June of 2024 by Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Marc Miller. These pathways to permanent residence programs will begin on March 31, 2025, replacing the five-year pilot programs that ran from June 2019 to June 2024. In making the announcement last year, Minister 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 released, 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.
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 recent years 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.
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.
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.
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:
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