In the first two draws of the year, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has only invited PNP candidates to apply for Canadian immigration.
Canada held a new Express Entry draw on January 19, inviting 1,036 immigration candidates to apply for permanent residence.
IRCC only invited Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) candidates. For this reason, the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score cutoff was 745. PNP candidates get an automatic 600 points added to their score when they receive their nomination, which is why the score seems high.
All Express Entry draws since September have been for PNP candidates only. The last time Canadian Experience Class (CEC) candidates were invited was September 14.
So far in 2022, IRCC has invited 1,428 PNP candidates in total under Express Entry. Generally speaking, the CRS cut-off has been in the 700-800 range during the last 10 PNP-specific EE draws. Today’s cut-off of 745 was lower than the 808 CRS requirement for the first draw of this year on January 5.
As of January 4, there are about 1,94,000 Express Entry candidates in the pool. About 80% of these candidates are eligible for the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP), and nearly 20% are eligible for the CEC. These numbers are rounded, but the difference makes up the number of candidates eligible for other programs like the PNP and the Federal Skilled Trades Program.
IRCC has not invited FSWP candidates to apply for permanent residence since December 2020. Before the pandemic, FSWP candidates were by far the most commonly invited. About 45% of all Express Entry invitations went to FSWP candidates in 2019. But since FSWP candidates have not had the chance to apply for more than a year, the pool has filled up.
The number of CEC candidates in the pool has also dramatically increased since September. Currently, they make up nearly 20% of the pool, whereas six months before they made up about 6%. That was in June when IRCC was holding large CEC draws inviting 6,000 candidates to apply at a time.
An internal memo from September suggests that IRCC paused CEC draws to help reduce application backlogs and get Express Entry processing back down to six months. In 2020, the average processing time for Express Entry candidates was up to nine months.
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