Vanmala Subramaniam The Globe and Mail  July 20 2026

On a WhatsApp group chat with hundreds of child caregivers and personal support workers – all foreign nationals hoping to obtain Canadian permanent residency status – there is a palpable sense of frustration.

“They are not realizing what damage they are doing to us,” said one participant, referring to the federal immigration ministry.

“They don’t care about how people are affected by their policies and rules,” chimed in another. “Truth is, we are cooked. Should we send an email to Mark Carney?” queried yet another group member, only to be met with laughing emojis.

With 687 participants and growing, the group chat is hardly ever dormant. Group members are mostly there to seek solace from others and vent about their collective situation.

In March, 2025, they applied for permanent residence through a dedicated immigration stream for home care workers. The program took 5,500 applications on a first-come, first-served basis, a fraction of total demand. Those who managed to get their applications accepted through an online portal were ecstatic, convinced that they were now on a straightforward path to obtain Canadian permanent residency.

But more than 15 months later, they have received no updates from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on their applications. Many are now living in Canada on expired work permits, unable to legally work. Others hold work permits that are expiring in the near future, and are frantically searching for alternative immigration pathways. All are hoping that someone in the group chat will provide a sliver of information or a positive update that will offer them a lifeline to remain in the country.

IRCC’s website states that the current PR processing timeline for home care workers is a whopping 76 months – far longer than the average wait time for other immigration streams. There are roughly 38,000 total applications in the queue for home care workers, including those from other years.

Since 2019, the government has had dedicated immigration pathways for home care workers under various names, the most recent of which is the 2025 stream. On an annual basis since 2019, between 5,000 and 6,000 PR spots were intended for this category of workers. But processing times have been sluggish as of late.

Last December, Ottawa cancelled the 2025 iteration of this immigration stream – the Home Care Worker Immigration pilots program – citing the processing backlog.

Labour advocates and migrant worker groups have long complained that the government de-prioritizes care workers in its immigration plans, even though there is a documented shortage of workers for families in need of care for the disabled, their children or elderly relatives.

In a study published in June, 2025, labour researchers at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that there was a disproportionate delay in the processing of PR applications for care workers compared to other economic migrants. Specifically, they found that between 2019 and 2023 IRCC had processed just 16 per cent of care worker immigration applications within the department’s promised 12-month processing service standard in that period, compared to 37 per cent for other types of immigrants.

Processing backlogs across many immigration streams have only gotten worse in the last two years, the result of a dramatic tightening of immigration quotas. Critically, in late 2024, the government reduced its intake goal for permanent residents to 380,000 from 500,000 annually. It also set a target of reducing the number of temporary residents in the country to 5 per cent of the population by the end of 2027 from a peak of 7.6 per cent, which meant that hundreds of thousands of work- and study-permit holders would have to leave the country.

“When you reduce the total permanent resident quota, you have to make tough decisions on what applications you want to process first. Right now, it is clear that care workers are not being prioritized,” said Lou Janssen Dangzalan, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer.

Tens of thousands of home caregivers who had, over the years, either come to Canada to work with families or trained as personal support workers in local Canadian colleges are now trapped in a convoluted bureaucratic maze.

As they wait for their applications to be processed, they can only legally work as long as their existing work permits are valid, or if they are granted a “maintained status” document, which is effectively a work-permit extension. Maintained status is not granted automatically but can be applied for through a quick online process.

IRCC rules do not allow applicants to the 2025 Home Care Worker Immigration pilots to obtain Bridging Open Work Permits, a type of visa that allows temporary residents to work legally for any employer in Canada while waiting for the government to make a decision on their PR applications. Applicants in previous years were issued BOWPs.

In an e-mail to The Globe, IRCC spokesperson Mary Rose Sabater confirmed that 2025 home care worker applicants were still not eligible for BOWPs. She did not say why.

“Temporary residence pathways remain available for home care workers to continue working in Canada, and employers can continue to hire caregivers through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program,” Ms. Sabater said.

Of the 5,510 applications received for the Home Care Worker Immigration pilots in March, 2025, only 570 have received an Acknowledgement of Receipt, a document stating that their application is now in a formal processing queue, according to data from IRCC obtained by The Globe.

But the numbers also show the department had barely processed any of the 5,510 applications as of March, 2026. None had been approved.

Gabriela Ona has still not received an Acknowledgement of Receipt document from IRCC about her 2025 immigration application. “I thought it would take a few weeks,” she told The Globe.

Her husband and teenage son are dependent on her work permit status, because it determines whether they can legally remain in Canada.

A midwife from the Philippines, she arrived in Canada in 2022 to train as a personal support worker at Sault College in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. Her postgraduate work visa was valid for three years upon graduation, and will expire in June, 2027. In the last four years, she has worked various part-time jobs in Toronto, mostly as a nanny, and occasionally took on night shifts to care for elderly clients in their homes. There was never a shortage of work, she says.

This spring, more than a year after she applied for the home care worker pilot program, Ms. Ona decided to try her luck at a new immigration pathway, the Rural Community Immigration Pilot in Ontario. That pilot grants permanent residency to foreign workers with a job offer who choose to reside in a rural part of the province. Ms. Ona and her family relocated to Sudbury this month to begin an entirely new immigration journey, a process which she described as “exhausting, but necessary.” There is no guarantee of success.

Syed Hussan, executive director of Migrant Rights Alliance of Change, said that in its current form the immigration system keeps most workers from ever achieving the ability to live in Canada on a long-term basis. “The people being pushed out are the same people Canada depends on to care for its aging population,” he said.

One of the few options for care workers on expiring permits is to ask a prospective employer to sponsor them for a temporary work permit through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. This, however, requires families to fill in a Labour Market Impact Assessment document, an arduous and expensive form that requires an employer to prove to the government that they cannot find a local worker for the job.

“Families must be willing to spend anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 to get an LMIA done. That’s a big cost for a lot of families,” said Jacqueline Bonisteel, an Ottawa-based immigration lawyer whose practice handles many cases involving home care workers. Ms. Bonisteel also noted that it is not as easy for employers to get an LMIA approved, compared to previous years.

“Employers are facing tighter scrutiny from the government. So the process becomes even more onerous,” she said.

Mr. Dangzalan, the Toronto immigration lawyer, said he is noticing a similar pattern with LMIA approvals. “Any Canadian employer trying to hire a foreign national is facing extra scrutiny from the government,” he said.

“It is really tough for the families looking for care workers, especially if they have a child or elderly relative with high needs. If you hire a personal support worker who already holds a work permit, there’s no guarantee that person will stay with you because of their immigration situation. So you have to go through the LMIA process. Even then, the worker is usually only issued a one year permit, and then you have to go through the process again.”

Iliriana Pantina, originally from Croatia, has spent the last six years navigating LMIA jobs and the Temporary Foreign Worker system. She first arrived in Canada on a spousal closed work permit – her husband, Ricardo Sustaita, was a temporary foreign worker at a farm outside Kelowna, B.C. Closed work permits tie the worker to a single employer, meaning that they cannot freely change jobs or find new jobs if they get laid off.

In 2021, a year after arriving in Canada, Mr. Sustaita got laid off and they both lost their ability to work. Ms. Pantina found a family in Kelowna who was willing to sponsor her for an LMIA-approved job as a nanny to their two young kids. She was hopeful that there would be some semblance of longevity to her child care job, as the family she worked for assured her they would continue keeping her on, as long as they were authorized to by the government and received positive LMIA approvals.

For Ms. Pantina, the home care worker pilot programs were a promising way of getting out of the closed work permit cycle and being able to stay in Canada for the long-term. She applied in 2024 but her application did not get through because IRCC capped applications at 5,500 on a first-come, first-serve basis.

In 2025, she got lucky – her application got through. But since then, she has heard nothing from the government. “I’ve contacted the immigration department so many times. I’ve sent letters from my local councillor and member of parliament. We put so much effort and money into this, it is a crazy situation.”

The Kelowna family is not planning to keep Ms. Pantina employed on a full-time basis any longer because their children are older. Last December, her work permit expired. She’s now on “maintained status,” which means that she effectively cannot work – her expired work permit was a closed work permit, which means that her “status” in the country is maintained as a worker on a closed work permit. She’s now reliant on her husband’s income – he managed to find another LMIA-approved job at a farm in Sechelt, B.C.

“I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to live here on an expired permit. For example, I can’t drive, because I’m not allowed to renew my driving licence,” she said.

“But we want to evolve. We want to contribute to Canada. Why does the government want to keep us stuck?”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-thousands-of-home-care-workers-are-stuck-in-limbo-as-permanent/