Changes have been made to the Federal Canadian Skilled Worker Visa, the government has announced.
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28 June 2010
Changes to the Canadian Skilled Worker Visa category effective immediately
Canada’s 2010 immigration plan will put even greater emphasis on economic recovery and reduce the federal skilled worker backlog, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney said.
“When I met with my provincial colleagues last week, they all stressed the importance of economic immigration,” Canadian Immigration Minister Kenney said.
“As we recover from the recession, increasing economic immigration will help ensure employers have the workers they need to supplement our domestic labour supply.”
The planned Canadian immigration range for 2010 is 240,000 – 265,000 immigrants, and the department expects they will achieve the upper end of this range and welcome more immigrants in the economic category, which includes federal Canadian Skilled Worker Visa applicants and record-level numbers of provincial nominees.
The Minister said Canada receives more applications than can be processed in a timely way, and as a result the department is limiting the number of new applications it will consider in the federal skilled worker category every year.
“Canada will continue to welcome historically high numbers of immigrants, but we need to manage the number of new applications or risk creating new backlogs and longer processing times,” Minister Kenney said.
“We have more than enough applications on hand now to fill many of our needs, and we want to be fair to those people who have been waiting the longest.”
Effective immediately, to be eligible to apply as a federal skilled worker, applicants must either have a job offer, or they must have experience in one of 29 occupations on the Priority Occupation List.
For those applying under the Priority Occupation List, the government will limit the number of applications considered for processing to 20,000 per year.
Within the 20,000 limit, a maximum of 1,000 applications per occupation will be considered.
In addition, all federal skilled worker and Canadian Experience Class applicants must submit the results of an independent language test before they will be considered.
Other than the language test result requirement, these changes apply only to the federal skilled worker immigration category.
The changes are designed to allow the government to keep the intake of applications for economic immigration in line with the number and types of jobs available as well as providing timely processing times for migrants.
The Canadian Visa Bureau is an independent consulting company specialising in helping people apply for a Canadian Visa with the Canadian Embassy.
