Canada’s decision to close the files of skilled workers who applied to immigrate before March 2008 will give the country a black eye and deter future immigrants with needed skills, according to a Vancouver immigration lawyer.
The federal government plans to return applications and refund fees for nearly everyone who applied under the program before Feb. 27, 2008. The policy change is expected to affect about 280,000 applicants, including dependents, Citizen-ship and Immigration Canada announced in a news release on Friday. The change is necessary to cut the backlog and shorten application processing times for skilled workers, making the program more responsive to the needs of the Canadian economy, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said in the release.
Immigration lawyer Zool Suleman said most, if not all, of the people affected by the change live abroad and have no recourse. “There is no sym-pathetic constituency for them that the minister has to deal with within Canada, but it does bring a significant black eye to Canada’s immigration program,” said Suleman, who is in the process of giving the news to his clients. “So it’s kind of an unfair treatment of these individuals who applied in good faith, in keeping with the rules, and then retroactively the rules are changed.”
The immigration department is advising those affected to reapply under the current rules, which changed in March 2008. But some will no longer be eligible. Before March 2008, any-one who met the criteria under the points system could apply to immigrate through the foreign skilled worker program and there was no limit to the number of applications the immigration department could receive, Suleman said. Since then, the Conservative government has reduced the number of eligible occupations and capped the number of applications in an effort to reduce the backlog.
The people affected include, but are not limited to, certain kinds of engineers, nurses, specialty cooks and computer technicians, Suleman said…
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via Skilled workers program changes give Canada a black eye: lawyer | Get in the Know. by Tara Carman
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