Canada has announced further changes to the number of visas that are issued to temporary workers, students, and their spouses.
This is the latest bid by the government to take control of its immigration levels that have spiraled out of control and become a major political issue with early elections expected to be held by June 2025.
In the new rules, the number of international study permits that will be issued in the year 2025 have been cut to 437,000. This is down from the 509,390 study permits that were approved in the year 2023.
This year, the IRCC had announced that it planned to approve 485,000 study permits. So far in the year 2024, Canada has approved 175,920 study permits.
Apart from the reduction in numbers, all applications for Post Graduation Work Permit (PGWP) will be required to include language proficiency.
In particular, applicants will be required to show evidence of their English or French language abilities by scoring and presenting a Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) Level 7 for university graduates and CLB 5 for college graduates. This will come into effect starting from November 1, 2024.
Additionally, international students will need to reapply for a study permit when changing schools. The Canadian government further announced that starting later this year, it is only the spouses of Master’s degree students in programs that last at least 16 months who will be eligible for work permits.
In the same vein, the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and the International Mobility Program (IMP) will only issue work permits to the spouses of foreign workers in management or professional occupations or in industries where there is a proven labour shortage.
The government further announced that there might be changes to the asylum process and how applications are handled. This comes after rising numbers of applications from persons whose visitor, student, or work visas expire and they do not want to return to their home countries.
These new restrictions come as the Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) continues to face historical backlogs in its application portal. For instance, the IRCC had 1,002,400 applications in the backlog as of July 31, 2024, out of the 2,364,700 total applications that are currently in the inventory.
Canada bans visitors from applying for work permits from within the country
644,400 out of 1,362,300 applications for temporary visas (including student visas and work permits) were in the backlog.
During this period under review, 508,000 study permit applications (including extensions) were finalized between January 1 and July 31, 2024, and 791,000 work permit applications (including extensions) were finalized during the same period.
