A temporary hold has been placed on Canada’s Federal Skilled Worker Programme and Federal Immigrant Investor Programme in Canada the Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister announced yesterday.
Jason Kenny, the Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister disclosed that both the Federal Skilled Worker Programme and the Federal Immigrant Investor Programmes would temporarily be ceased as reviews of the immigration system are implemented. Speaking in a press release he commented: “We have been making lots of changes to our economic immigration system. We will take the next six months to do a lot of the heavy lifting to get us closer to a fast and flexible immigration system.”
It is believed that the temporary moratorium on new applications will allow the CIC to process the outstanding applications and efficiently implement the changes to their immigration processes, which include eliminating the backlog of old FSWP applications; improving the selection of FSWs and creating a new Federal Skilled Trades Programme.
“This temporary pause on new Federal Skilled Worker applications will allow us to set the program on a new course as we intend to launch revised selection criteria soon. The pause has no impact on the number of workers Canada admits into the country, as CIC continues to process applications already received. Current immigration remains at historically high levels,” explained Kenney.
Candidates that already have offers of arranged employment, as well as those applying under the PhD stream, are still welcome to apply to the FSW program and are not impacted by the moratorium.
It is anticipated that the application process for the Skilled Worker and Investment Visa Programmes will be reopened in January 2013 when the proposed FSWP regulatory changes come into force.
Read the full article: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/releases/2012/2012-06-28.asp
