NEWS RELEASE : An Immigration System That Works For Canada’s Economy Moving to a Fast, Flexible Just-in-Time Immigration System
Toronto, November 2, 2012 — Today, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney announced that by the end of 2013, Canada’s immigration system will be transformed from one that was plagued by backlogs into one that is fast, flexible, and responsive to the labour market. Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) announced today it will admit up to 55,300 persons in the Federal Skilled Worker (FSW) category in 2013. Combined with previous actions taken to manage the backlog, this means by the end of 2013 we will be able to process new applications as they are received – a “just in time” system – and aim to process them in less than a year, instead of up to eight years under the old FSW program. In addition, CIC expects to clear the FSW applications received to date by the end of 2014, three years earlier than originally expected. This will allow for the introduction of an Expression of Interest (EOI) system to be put in place for FSW and possibly other economic immigration streams. CIC is moving to a just-in-time system that recruits people with the right skills to meet Canada’s labour market needs, fast tracks their applications, and gets them working in a period of months, instead of years.