Published on : December 23, 2021
Key Highlights:
On Wednesday, The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) invited 746 immigration applicants to apply for permanent residence status in Canada under the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP).
The candidates who received the Invitations to Apply (ITAs) for PR had received a nomination from a Canadian province under PNP, due to which they got an additional 600 points in their Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score.
As a result of these additional points, the cut-off for this draw was 720 points. Therefore, before receiving the nomination, the candidate had to have just 120 points in the CRS score.
The federal government has only held Canadian Experience Class(CEC), and PNP draws since the start of 2021 and even stopped the CEC ones in September and conducted 8 PNP rounds after that.
According to a memo issued by the IRCC, it has paused CEC draws to focus on the Express Entry application backlogs. It wants to cut these by half before considering inviting applications from other federal programs.
The country has now held 35 PNP-only draws and 27 CEC draws, collectively issuing 114,431 ITAs to date. The most significant draw that contributed to this was the February 13th one, where the IRCC issued a record-breaking 27,332 invitations.
It has now been one whole year since the Canadian government has held an all-program draw which includes CEC, PNP, Federal Skilled Workers and Federal Skilled Trades.
This move was meant to allow the federal government to target only candidates already in the country as there were travel restrictions on candidates applying from abroad due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
