P.E.I.'s new population strategy stifling hopes for permanent residency, foreign workers say
'We don't want to move,' says worker whose residency is now at risk due to reduction in nominations
Some foreign workers on P.E.I. say they're frustrated and worried as recent changes to the province's immigration strategy put their chance to get permanent residency at risk.
Monika Dablehar and Hardeep Singh, two friends from India, say they're among many workers in P.E.I. who are now in that position.
"To be very honest, I don't know what I have to do," Dablehar said. "I am not sleeping for whole nights. Whenever I'm at work, I'm always feeling stressed."
Their concerns come after the P.E.I. government announced in February that it's cutting the number of people it nominates for permanent residency by 25 per cent in 2024. It's part of the province's new population strategy that aims to ease a strained health-care system and housing market.
"It was really earth-shattering," Singh said. "The first few nights I couldn't sleep."
He and Dablehar moved to the Island a year ago on open work permits after studying in Ontario, and got jobs at fast food restaurants. Their goal: to get their permanent residency, or PR, and build a life in Canada.
Friends and immigration consultants told them P.E.I. was the best place to get nominated for PR by the provincial government.
Kelly Hamilton, an immigration consultant in Charlottetown, said it used to be a near sure thing.
"It didn't matter whether you were working at McDonald's or Tim Hortons," Hamilton said.
"If you had that full-time permanent job, working your minimum 30 hours a week, met the requirements of the [provincial nominee program], you could put your name in the pool and you could pretty much 100 per cent be guaranteed to get that invitation to make an application.
"Now that's not happening."
As the province reduces the total number of people it nominates for PR, it's focusing the remaining nominations on skilled workers in key sectors like health care, child care and construction.
Sales and service sectors, on the other hand, will see their nominations slashed — from 855 last year to 215 this year.
"We have already made our families and friends here," Singh said. "We don't want to move from here."
To suddenly hear the door is shut, it's a panic.— Kelly Hamilton
Hamilton said, at the moment, the province isn't considering sales and service workers at all.
"I get people in here extremely worried, extremely nervous. They've invested a lot of time, a lot of energy into these processes.... And now for them to suddenly hear the door is shut, it's a panic," she said.
Dablehar and Singh said they don't know what to do. Their work permits expire in a few months.
All of their experience is in the service sector, and they don't have the time or money to go back to school and learn a new skill.
They are frustrated that the government changed it's nomination approach without warning.
"If you give us advance warning [for] next year from this year, we won't be accepting invitations from this industry, we'll work accordingly," Singh said. "But if this kind of thing happens for people with short work permits, we can't do anything about it. It's really stressful for us."
Dablehar said she doesn't want to move away and start a new life all over again.
The pair said some of their friends have moved to other provinces, hoping they can find a path to permanent residency elsewhere.
Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer and policy analyst, said those friends aren't likely to have much success.
'It's a numbers game, not a people game'
Across Canada, there are hundreds of thousands of people on work permits hoping to get their permanent residency, Kurland said, at a time when most provinces are changing their rules and cutting back on nominations.
"It's a numbers game, not a people game," he said.
"It's always politically possible to grandfather applicants [who are] already here and say 'heads up, in 2026 here are the changes we're going to make.' They could do that. They didn't do that. And the result: there's going to be a lot of disappointed people already here."
The P.E.I. government has called the change to its immigration policy temporary, though it hasn't said when or under what conditions it could change back.
"Even without the temporary measure, the volume of applications could not be addressed in how the province uses nominations," the government said in a statement to CBC News.
Dablehar and Singh say they're running out of time.
"I hope that the government will consider us and they will change the rules," said Dablehar.
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