The Canadian government is introducing changes to its immigration policy in order to attract more economic immigrants and reduce the federal skilled worker backlog.
The announcement was made by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney at a news conference.
“When I met with my provincial colleagues last week, they all stressed the importance of economic immigration,” said Kenney. “As we recover from the recession, increasing economic immigration will help ensure employers have the workers they need to supplement our domestic labour supply.”
For 2010, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) set the range of immigrants in its economic, family and humanitarian categories between 240,000 and 265,000. CIC usually ends each year achieving the midpoint but this year it’s aiming for the upper end of the range, in order to allow more immigrants in the economic category to settle in Canada.
Among the additional immigrants Canada is expecting to welcome are more federal skilled workers and a record number of provincial nominees.
“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,” the minister says.
Effective immediately, to be eligible to apply as a federal skilled worker, applicants must either have a job offer, or experience in one of 29 occupations in demand.
Additionally, all federal skilled worker and Canadian Experience Class applicants must now submit the results of an independent language test before they will be considered.
