Canada has invited 940 candidates to apply for permanent residency in Canada in the largest PNP draw held in the country’s history.
Successful candidates in this round of the Express Entry draw, held on June 9, needed to have a Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score of at least 711 points.
However, all candidates who were invited in this invitation round were able to submit their applications with 600 additional points, which they were awarded from having already been nominated by Canadian provinces.
Being nominated by a Canadian province under a Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) grants immigration candidates an additional 600 points on their CRS score, which helps them boost their profiles when applying to the federal government for permanent Canadian immigration.
Without the PNP nomination requirement, the cutoff score for this round of the invitation draw would have been only 111 points.
Successful candidates who were invited to apply for permanent residency in Canada in this invitation round had to have submitted their Express Entry profiles before February 16, 2021.
In the previous PNP-only draw conducted by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), 500 applicants were invited to apply for permanent Canadian immigration. The cutoff score for that round of the draw was 713 points.
So far in 2021, Canada has invited more than 75,000 candidates to apply for Canadian immigration with permanent residency, whereas around only 27,000 candidates were invited at this stage last year.
Ever since the pandemic broke out and forced border closures, IRCC has held periodic invitation rounds to invite onshore candidates to apply for permanent residency in Canada.
This strategy has allowed Canada to stay on course to meeting its target of welcoming more than 400,000 new permanent residents to the country by the end of this year as part of its Immigration Levels Plan.
Under the new Immigration Levels Plan, Canada outlined its ambitions of admitting 1.2 million new permanent residents to the country by 2023.
In addition to maintaining its immigration targets for the year, the periodic invitation rounds have also allowed IRCC to avoid complexities regarding travel restrictions for offshore candidates due to the pandemic.
While international travel remains restricted to combat the spread of Covid-19, IRCC is continuing to invite onshore PNP and Canadian Experience Class (CEC) candidates to apply for permanent residency in Canada.
CEC candidates usually have lower cutoff scores in their invitation rounds, due to large draw sizes from a relatively small pool of applicants.
