Ukrainian refugees in Canada, the federal budget for 2022 and other news of the week
Immigration Canada is busy processing documents for Ukrainian refugees, provinces are changing local laws, the federal budget for 2022 has been passed and there has been an increase in fees for permanent residency.
Job fairs
Starting in May, major Canadian cities will begin holding customary job fairs. Only vaccinated visitors will be allowed in. A fair is planned for May 3 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Employers from all Atlantic provinces will be represented at the fair. There will be a fair in Toronto in June, Winnipeg in July, and Calgary in August. A fair is planned for November in Vancouver. All of these fairs are organized by Canadian Immigrant magazine in cooperation with provincial organizations that help immigrants adapt and find jobs.
Help for Ukrainians
The Ministry of Immigration is overwhelmed with admitting Ukrainians. The queue for other immigrants is only growing. Russian oppositionists who applied before the war began or have asked for a visitor visa now, Canadian officials refuse to grant asylum or priority processing. That said, one of our subscribers from Ukraine wrote in his Telegram feed that he was granted asylum. He came before the war, applied under a different program, waited two and a half years for a trial, then there was a trial, which he lost, he appealed, and then the other day he got an envelope with a positive decision. It said that asylum was approved due to the situation in Ukraine. Had it not been for the war, he would have had to go home. We recommend to subscribe to our Telegram-channel, there is useful information published every day. All links are in the description to the video.
As of Saturday, April 9, the Department of Immigration has approved more than 30,000 applications for the Canada-Ukraine Emergency Entry Permit. On April 6, the Minister of Immigration said Canada had received more than 112,000 applications from Ukrainians. As of April 1, about 65,000 applications had been submitted and about 12,000 approved. It is not known what the rejection rate is, but it is unlikely to be more than 50%. This means that the Department of Immigration is capable of processing about 18,000 applications per week. For the first quarter of 2022, the department processed 147,000 applications for permanent residency and approved more than 108,000. That is, on average, the ministry processed 12,000 applications per week, twice as many as in 2021.
On April 9, the Canadian prime minister again promised Ukrainians free charter flights, as well as two weeks of hotel accommodation and financial aid for the first time. Canada has allocated another $100 million CAD for humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Canadian provinces one after another are announcing help for incoming Ukrainians. British Columbia has opened a special hotline and a separate portal in Ukrainian and Russian, where you can find out which school to enrol your children in and how to access free medical services. The province of Ontario has also opened a hotline, and has allocated money to Canadian-Ukrainian community organizations and established a scholarship for Ukrainian students. Saskatchewan sent a delegation to Germany to invite the specialists the province needs and find out on the spot how best to help Ukrainians. The Northwest Territories health minister demanded that the local legislature provide conditions for recruiting nurses from Ukraine.
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