Editor's note: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Some immigrants nominated for permanent residency under Ontario’s provincial program say they regret accepting their invitations, noting that year-long delays have left them out of a job and considering leaving the country.
Yuvraj Sandha came to Canada in 2019 to study to be a mechanical engineering technician. He started working in construction in 2022 in the Hamilton area and received an invitation to apply to the Ontario Immigrant Nomination Program (OINP) skilled trades stream in March 2024.
As of September 2025, he is still waiting for a final decision, and his work permit expired in February.
“How much time (do) they need to verify me?” he told The Trillium. “I’m totally helpless. I don’t know what to do right now.”
Sandha, who said he was “very excited” to get an OINP invitation 16 months ago, now says he regrets staying in Ontario. He believes he could have moved to another province and had a better chance of getting permanent residency.
It’s a sentiment Abhijeet Gujral shares.
Gujral came to Canada as a business student and received an invitation to apply to the OINP in August 2023. His online status last month still said “additional processing time needed.”
Meanwhile, his work permit expired in March.
“I'm running out of patience and I'm running out of time,” he told The Trillium.
Gujral applied under the skilled trades stream while working as a delivery driver supervisor in Sarnia, Ont. He acknowledged there were some issues with his application and that the consultant he retained made some mistakes. However, he responded to OINP’s last request for further documentation in February after receiving an intent to refuse notice, hopeful that he could clarify some of their concerns — and has still not heard back.
He’s decided to go back home to India this fall to continue accumulating work experience.
“It’s definitely depressing as hell,” he said, adding that he “a thousand per cent” regrets going this route for permanent residency. “What they did is box me in Ontario … took so much of time, took so much of money. At the end now they're just saying, wait, wait, wait.”
“There’s no update, there’s no communication, there is no transparency. It’s like they took our $1,500 and told us to just like, kind of go to hell.”
The OINP allows the provincial government to nominate candidates for permanent residency based on their skills and experience. The province has recently pivoted to prioritizing skilled trades in industries like health care, manufacturing, technology and agriculture.
It’s supposed to take a maximum of 150 days — or five months — to process the application; however, a large number of applicants are reporting waits of over a year.
Elizabeth Long, founder of LM Law Group, says it’s “a little bit unusual” to have an application from September 2023 unanswered, but she has seen a large number of applications submitted in 2024 that remain pending.
Long says she believes the federal reduction in immigration allocations for 2025 is playing a significant role in the delays, noting the province is likely still trying to make decisions on who to give the nominations to this year.
The federal government reduced the number of immigrant allocations for Ontario by 50 per cent, from 21,500 nominations in 2024 to 10,750 in 2025. The province, as well as other experts, say that created a big challenge, as invitations for the following year had already been sent out on the assumption that the numbers would be similar.
“What happens is the province makes its decisions on how many people they invite to apply based on how many people (are in) their allocations for each year, and so they were still inviting people to apply,” Long said.
At the same time, Long says she “highly” doubts the province has processed 10,000 nominations for this year.
“I haven't had any of my applications beyond, I think it was January, February — beyond very early this year — be processed from last year,” she said, adding that the delay has a significant toll on the applicants.
“They've been working in Ontario for many years, they are needed employees, and they have done everything right in order to go through the system, and yet, they are out of jobs. They lose their status because they're stuck in this bureaucratic nightmare.”
NDP MPP and citizenship critic Alexa Gilmour told The Trillium that she’s spoken with a number of individuals who are struggling as they await news of their application.
“These are real lives. You know, there's a gentleman that sat across from me a month ago contemplating suicide because he doesn't know how to navigate what comes next. Does he go home? Does he wait? He's got no transparency.”
Gilmour says the government has also been inconsistent in whose applications are processed, and that some people get in within four months while others who applied much earlier have yet to get more than an automated email reply.
While the province tackles the backlog in applications, the NDP is calling for work permits to be extended for those on the OINP waitlist. This, they argue, would allow them to at least overcome the financial toll of the delays and keep their status as employees.
The province says it does provide letters of support to the federal government for OINP job-offer streams so that they can be considered for a work permit extension. However, that letter is not available for applicants going through the express entry streams, which include those who apply under the skilled trades category.
“Temporary work permits and timelines are a federal responsibility,” said Michel Figueredo, director of communications for Labour Minister David Piccini.
The ministry did not address the issue of application delays when asked about them by The Trillium. Instead, it noted that the province launched a new employer portal to make it “easier for employers to support people who are already here, with jobs, towards a pathway to permanent residency.”
“We continue to call on the federal government for greater provincial autonomy to set immigration targets and secure the high-skilled workforce that drives our economy forward and meets the needs of our province,” the ministry said.
In Manitoba, prospective immigrant nominee program candidates are able to apply for a support letter that would allow for federal work permits to be temporarily extended for two years. That’s due to an agreement the province came to with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), which allows for these applications to be submitted for extensions until Dec. 31, 2025.
“If you’re waiting for an answer, can the provincial government ask for those workers’ permits to be extended while they are delayed, not due to their own fault?” Gilmour asked.
The federal government says the reduced immigration allocation “aims to strike a balance” and help provinces “manage application processing times while still giving provinces and territories the flexibility to meet their most urgent labour market needs.”
IRCC spokesperson Remi Lariviere said that it is the responsibility of each jurisdiction to decide how to use their allocations.
“This year, all provinces and territories are encouraged to focus their nominations to target their most critical labour market needs,” Lariviere wrote in a statement.
The province has made adjustments to the OINP to do just that through its Working for Workers Acts and other regulations, giving the ministry of labour the ability to change the program based on labour needs.
The Ford government has also changed the rules to allow the government to return applications without cause if they don’t meet those priorities, as well as the province's nomination allocations, among other things.
Long argues the province likely doesn’t want to return applications, adding that if they start to do so, “people won’t trust to apply through the program.”
“If people don't trust applying through the program, then the province in the future is going to have major issues being able to attract people that they want to stay in the province.”
Gilmour agreed, going further to say that individuals who have already begun their OINP applications should be grandfathered in.
“After those people have spent $1,500 to apply and gone through the whole process, the government can decide that they are going to refuse and change course and change the number of allotted spaces, which is very frustrating, obviously, for those who think they're in the process,” she said.
“It's a bit of an injustice, right? They came in good faith, put their applications in, put the $1,500 down, expecting that this process would sort of be seamless, like it had been in the past.”
For Josh — whose name has been changed due to concerns that speaking out could impact his OINP application — the delays are somewhat understandable, while frustrating.
He came to Canada in 2018 when he was 17-years-old to pursue a business degree and was invited to apply to the OINP in September 2024 under the human capital priorities stream while working as a bank manager — a profession he understands may not be the province’s top priority amid slashed allocations.
He has yet to receive an acceptance or refusal, and his work permit expired in August. He described the situation as “a weird loop” in which the federal government won’t extend a work permit until you have a confirmed permanent residence application, which requires a nomination certificate from the province.
“I could appreciate why the delays are happening. Nonetheless, the delays were still frustrating,” he said. “I was expecting (the nomination) to happen because it was presented as a certainty. But over the past year, it continues to fade away into this weird question mark.”
“From a very personal lens, immigration has been this weird dangling carrot in my life. I can't optimize my life for an immigration circumstance, because my life is a little bit more than that, like I have goals beyond that.”
It’s for that reason that he’s left Canada to continue his studies in London, U.K., where he is completing a master’s degree in public administration.
Moving to London was not Josh’s first choice. He applied as a backup in January because he didn’t want to be in a situation where he’s out of a job with no plan.
“In terms of making the decision to leave, you're really not left a choice. The day your work permit expires, your health card expires, your social insurance number expires, you cannot legally work in the country. You are rendered an alien, technically, right? Like it's truly a flip of a switch,” he told The Trillium, adding that’s despite working every year since his arrival and paying taxes to the Canadian government.
At the same time, Josh is still hopeful that his application will, eventually, be processed. He said he “very much settled” in Canada and would like to come back after his master’s.
“My first car was in the country, my first licence and first love, and all my firsts were truly. Canada was really a foundational experience … I'm very much from Canada in so many ways, but it's a joke that I have no status in Canada now.”
Meanwhile, the province is continuing to send out OINP invitations, with over 2,600 invites sent out in September and another 330 in August.