Canada invited 2,000 foreign workers already living in the country to apply for permanent residence on Sept. 15, continuing a run of draws that favour candidates with Canadian work experience over applicants abroad.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada issued the invitations under the Canadian Experience Class, one of the programs run through the Express Entry system. The cutoff was 519 points on the department's Comprehensive Ranking System, down from 521 in the previous round on Sept. 1. Candidates tied at 519 qualified only if they had entered the pool before 12:16 a.m. UTC on March 26.
The Canadian Experience Class is open to workers who have completed at least one year, or 1,560 hours, of authorised skilled work in Canada in the three years before applying and who meet the required proficiency in English or French. It does not apply to applicants intending to settle in Quebec, which selects its own economic immigrants.
Those conditions decide who among the Sri Lankans working in Canada on temporary permits, Tamils included, can benefit. Nationality carries no weight in the selection. Sri Lankan candidates are ranked by the same points formula as everyone else, on age, education, language test scores, Canadian work experience and other factors, and those who qualify enter the Express Entry pool and wait for a round in which the cutoff falls to their score.
The draw opened no route for workers outside Canada. It was confined to candidates who had already accumulated qualifying Canadian work experience, and it created no allocation of 2,000 places for applicants abroad.
A separate measure could reach a wider group of Sri Lankans already in the country. Under the In-Canada Workers Initiative, announced in the 2025 federal budget, Ottawa is accelerating permanent residence for up to 33,000 temporary workers over 2026 and 2027. The immigration minister, Lena Metlege Diab, set out the details on May 4. The department says it expects at least 20,000 of them to receive status in 2026, and reported that 3,600 had already done so in January and February.
The conditions are restrictive. The measure covers people who have already applied for permanent residence through the Provincial Nominee Program, the Atlantic Immigration Program, the community immigration pilots, the caregiver pilots or the Agri-Food Pilot, and who have lived in smaller Canadian communities for two years or more. All 41 of Canada's census metropolitan areas, among them Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa-Gatineau, are excluded. Applicants already in those queues need take no further action, and their files are moved ahead of others. Workers without such an application cannot use the measure to start one.
The federal fee for an economic immigration application is C$1,590 for the principal applicant, which includes the right of permanent residence fee. An accompanying spouse or partner pays the same amount and each dependent child C$270. IRCC raised those fees on April 30, taking the principal applicant's processing fee to C$990 and the right of permanent residence fee to C$600.
The draws are taking place as Ottawa reduces immigration overall. The 2026-28 levels plan holds permanent resident admissions at 380,000 a year through 2028, a level the department says sits below 1 percent of Canada's population. New temporary resident arrivals are capped at 385,000 this year and 370,000 in each of the two years after, with the stated aim of bringing the temporary resident population below 5 percent of the national total by the end of 2027. That share stood at 6.8 percent in December 2025, after peaking above 7.5 percent in 2024.
Fewer temporary residents are being admitted each year, while a portion of those already in the country are given permanent status and drop out of the temporary count.
For Sri Lankan Tamils with Canadian work permits, access depends on the program their application falls under, the length and type of their Canadian work experience, their language scores, and where in Canada they have been living. Ethnicity and nationality do not enter the calculation.
