Canada New Rural and Northern Immigration Project

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has announced a new pilot project to promote immigration for rural and northern communities to meet their labour market needs.

The immigration for rural and northern program is rather complex, but some basic information is as follows:

To participate, interested communities work with local economic development organizations to apply to IRCC to be considered for the program. Selected communities will receive some benefit in supporting immigrant applications.

Eligible Communities

To be eligible, a community must either:

• Have a population of less than 50,000 and be at least 75 km from a core metropolitan area, or
• Have up to 200,000 people and be considered remote from other large cities.

The program is available only in certain provinces and territories, namely, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Yukon.

The selected communities will need to have the ability to settle newcomers including resources with regard to, for example, housing, transportation, and health care.

Economic Development Organizations

An Economic Development Organization (EDO) can include, for instance, a chamber of commerce, or other not-for-profit economic development group.

Working with local municipal officials, such organizations develop strategic plans for economic development in an area, and will lead the process for a particular region.

Process

The community development organization, with support from local officials, submits an application based on its economic development plan, and will be expected to manage the pilot in the relevant community. Applications (at least for this initial pilot phase) must be submitted by March 1, 2019.

The full details of what assistance is then provided by IRCC are not yet fully expounded upon, but presumably, selected communities will be able to support applicants for permanent residence destined to their region/employers in their region. (This may in turn allow for some interim work permit allowances, but this is not fully clear at this time.)

There is some more update from IRCC but at this time, we simply wished to apprise readers of the new program.