She and her husband can secure a visitor permit to stay here legally. But that won’t allow them to work.
The new immigration pathway offered a total of 90,000 spots: 20,000 for temporary foreign workers in health care; 30,000 for those in other selected essential occupations; and 40,000 for international students who have graduated from a Canadian institution.
Legal experts said the policy of not offering bridging permits is only going to affect applicants in the migrant worker streams, because Ottawa is already extending international graduates’ expiring work permits for up to 18 months.
“All work permits have an expiry date. A lot of the applicants in the pathway pool are going to be stuck,” said Toronto immigration consultant Roya Golesorkhi, who is helping Khatamsazan.
To qualify for the new pathway, a migrant worker has to be legally employed and have accumulated at least one year of work experience in Canada in one of the 135 eligible occupations at the time of application. They must also have valid status in the country at the moment their application is approved and the permanent residence is conferred.
“The idea of the new pathway was to accept immigrants who are (legally) in Canada and are already employed,” Golesorkhi said. “But now they have to stop working. You can’t do that to people.”
Affected applicants can try to apply for new work permits. However, with a few exceptions, to obtain a work permit here, migrant workers need a job offer approved by Employment and Social Development Canada to show they are not taking employment away from qualified Canadians.
Getting that labour market impact assessment or LMIA approved is an impossible task for many of the applicants in the new pathway in the low-skilled but essential occupations such as cashiers, service station attendants, cleaners and labourers.
“The minister has indicated that the LMIA is an option, but for those of us on the ground, we know it is very, very difficult to obtain, especially for those who work in the areas (for which) the pathway is created,” said Burnaby-based immigration lawyer Will Tao.
“I don’t see any policy reason why the minister can’t provide the bridging permits for these applicants.”
Tao said Canada’s immigration system does allow people to apply for permanent residence under multiple programs and some pathway applicants could theoretically apply to other streams that give access to a bridging work permit, but that’s going to clog up the system further.
As of Friday, the immigration department had received more than 1,970 and 14,970 applications under the health worker and non-health worker streams respectively. The cap for the international graduate stream was met within 26 hours after application opened on May 6.
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