Ottawa has a message for the tens of thousands of temporary workers wondering whether they’ll get to stay in Canada: it isn’t a lottery system.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) says selection under its In-Canada Workers Initiative comes down to two things: the program a worker applied through; and the date they applied. Nothing else.

Hamilton Spectator July 25, 2026 Shilpashree Jagannathan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter New Canadian Media

Ottawa has a message for the tens of thousands of temporary workers wondering whether they’ll get to stay in Canada: it isn’t a lottery system. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) says selection under its In-Canada Workers Initiative comes down to two things: the program a worker applied through; and the date they applied. Nothing else.

“These individuals… are being triaged based on their date of application and the requirements of the program they have applied for — not any additional criteria,” IRCC said in a written response to questions.

It’s a clean, reassuring answer. It’s also one the department has declined to back up with numbers.

The initiative, announced in Budget 2025 and detailed further in a departmental update this spring, will accelerate permanent residence for up to 33,000 workers already living in Canada’s smaller and rural communities. By the end of February, IRCC said 3,600 had already received it. Eligible workers must have applied through the Provincial Nominee Program, the Atlantic Immigration Program, a community immigration pilot, a caregiver pilot or the Agri-Food Pilot, and lived in a smaller community for at least two years.

Asked for a breakdown of the 3,600 by stream, occupation or region — the kind of data that would let anyone check whether the process is landing evenly across sectors and provinces — IRCC’s answer was blunt: “Further data broken down by immigration category is not available at this time.”

The department also quietly walked back language from its own original announcement. The April release said the initiative targets workers with “strong roots” in their communities. Asked to explain what that means beyond the two-year residency rule, IRCC’s written response didn’t use the phrase at all, describing only the same two published criteria and insisting no additional weighting applies.

That gap, a government insisting its process is simple and neutral, while refusing to release the evidence that would confirm its claim, is the real story for many.

John Shields, a professor of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University who studies immigrant labour and settlement policy, says the initiative should not mislead people based on policy promises the current federal government has made to show it is course correcting. “The 33,000 aren’t new immigration spots,” he said — they’re existing permanent residence applicants pulled out of the temporary worker pool and folded into Canada’s already-set annual permanent resident target of 380,000.

“It’s a bit of gamesmanship,” Shields said, pointing to the government’s separate, politically-driven goal of shrinking the temporary resident population to 5 per cent of Canada’s total by 2027. Moving people from “temporary” to “permanent” columns helps hit that number without actually admitting more people. “It’s still coming out of the original number.”

Shields also notes Ottawa already has a template for doing this transparently. The Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot, which ran from 2019 until it stopped taking new applications in 2024, used a published, community-led scoring process. Its successor, the Rural Community Immigration Pilot, does the same across 14 designated communities today. Neither required the public to guess at what “strong roots” means.

The confusion is landing hardest in communities that don’t know if they even qualify. In Sechelt, B.C., Mayor John Henderson has spent months pushing Ottawa for a two-year automatic extension of work permits, arguing that anything shorter doesn’t give rural communities time to plan.

His group, Keep Families Together Sunshine Coast, wants extensions to automatically cover spouses and children too — a provision entirely absent from IRCC’s initiative, which addresses permanent residence for already-established applicants, not permit extensions or family unity for those still waiting.

In Burnaby, the confusion runs in a different direction. The city’s own interagency settlement council is bracing for the opposite outcome: as work and study permits expire, council doesn’t expect people to simply leave the country. “They are anticipating higher numbers of people without status in our community,” Councillor Maita Santiago said.

That leaves workers to make consequential decisions — renew a permit, switch employers, move to a different province, pay for immigration advice — without a clear way to know where they stand.

IRCC does point to one safety net: workers who apply to extend their status before their permit expires can receive what the department calls “maintained status,” letting them keep working while a decision is made. It’s a standard immigration mechanism, not something built specifically for this initiative, and it requires knowing to apply in time.

IRCC insists the initiative is helping workers “of all skill levels” across sectors ranging from healthcare and skilled trades to service and resource-based roles — and is not tilted toward higher-skilled occupations, as some worried.

But without the underlying numbers, there’s no way to check that claim against reality.

In-Canada Workers Initiative: Ottawa says new immigration for temporary workers is not a lottery–it sure feels like it.