TOP 10 Problems with the Canada H-1B Holder Work Permit

On July 16, 2023, and without any prior instructions, IRCC opened intake for 10,000 spots under a new Canada H-1B Holder Work Permit. Any person holding a valid H-1B visa and who lived in the USA could apply for a 3 year Open Work Permit in Canada. The spots filled in less than 48 hours and the program is now closed. There were some major flaws with the application process that prevented many people from successfully submitting their applications. Read on to learn more about my TOP 10 problems with the H-1B Holder Work Permit program.

1. No prior instructions and no guidelines.

   It serves no one to fail to release instructions until the day of filing. Even the TR to PR Pathway released instructions at least the day before and offered a technical briefing to counsel on how to support applicants through the process. Once again, this was a serious gap and an outright denial of Access to Justice, leaving many excellent candidates with no meaningful assistance or guidance.  People need a legitimate opportunity to prepare. When coupled with a race to file, IRCC will now have to deal with a substantial number of applications that are incomplete at best and ineligible at worst. Personally, I would guess at least 25% would be ineligible (I hope IRCC allowed in at least 13,000 to compensate for this). Overall, I don’t see a way for anyone to have submitted a perfect application without some form of separate letter of explanation. 

2. No clarity about the program launch time.

   IRCC should have indicated which of the many portals they would be using and a time for when the portal went live. It wasn’t fair or reasonable for people to get up at 12:01 am on the off-chance July 16th meant literally the start of the day. 

3. Instructions released hours after the launch of the program.

   Portal Access opened a number of hours before the IRCC released the website landing page and instructions. Most highly motivated people had already found the access point and they submitted their applications without instructions. I don’t know if it would have been possible for these people to submit an application that was without some deficiency. 

4. Conflicting information on proof of residence in US.

   The website landing page indicated that proof of residence in the US was a mandatory requirement, but no part of the document checklist in the portal itself mentioned the need to upload proof of residence. If the document checklist of mandatory documents in the portal was missing a key element of the application (according to instructions that IRCC published hours after opening the portal), it causes extreme concern for applicants who submitted their application in a race to file before IRCC released all the details. It will also likely lead to countless IRCC Webform updates. 

5. The Portal was not properly tested before it was released.

   There was a major glitch in coding on the “Activities” section that would not allow a candidate to advance to the next screen if they answered the questions properly for education and work history. This wasn’t an isolated event, but a glitch that affected all applicants. Only those committed enough to enter incomplete information in order to get the form to advance to the next screen, and who then included a letter of explanation to disclose the complete education or history could have been successful filing. There were many people that gave up at this stage because of this glitch and abandoned their applications. Others spent countless hours trying to figure out why they were getting an error message that their information was incomplete when they followed the instructions perfectly. People who submitted without an accompanying letter of explanation with their correct education or personal history might be at risk of misrepresentation.

6. The cap would have been reached within hours if people knew in advance where to apply and there was no glitch at the Activity section. 

   The cap of 10,000 spots for Principal Applicants was reached in less than 48 hours and the program closed as of Monday, July 17, 2023. If IRCC had announced which portal it would be using, and if the portal had been working properly, the 10,000 spots would have likely been gone within hours.

7. The choice to open the portal on a Sunday was problematic.

   Although this could have been seen as a day where most H1B Holders were not working and where therefore available to submit an application, it was also a day where any external help or support would be limited. In some locations it may have been difficult for applicants to secure digital photos for children, or bank statement etc. from financial institutions on a Sunday. Further, Sunday is a holy day for many world religions and to force people to have to give up Sunday worship to file an immigration application was disrespectful to that cohort of applicants. 

8. No clear instructions on how to include dependents within the application.

   Unless someone had prior experience submitting applications through the CUAET program (which used a similar portal), they would not understand how to include their dependents. Filing a work permit for an accompanying spouse was possible to sort out based on the manner in which the portal was set up. However, it would also have been impossible to properly include study permit applications for dependent children unless the Principal Applicant had already applied to Canada in the past and been issued a Unique Client Identification number (“UCI”).  The only way for a family to include an open study permit for minor children was to enter a made up placeholder UCI number to allow the screen to advance to the next section and then they would have to provide an explanation to IRCC confirming the UCI was false and only used to allow the application to go forward. Finally, there was no mechanism to include children as “family member of an H1B Visa holder” as was the case for the spousal open work permit option. The candidate would have needed to know enough to select the existing Study  Permit option and then ensure it was included in the family group. 

9. Fear of missing out and uncertainty for family members.

   Many Principal Applicants filed individually instead of including their spouse and children out of fear the cap would be reached before they had time to fill in the information for their family. Adding family through the IRCC Portal could take up to three times as long compared to filing as an individual.  This effectively prejudiced families over individual applicants. The best H1B candidates are those with years of work experience. Often they have families after working for years in the USA. IRCC effectively alienated a majority of their best candidates. Finally, with the Portal Access now closed, there is no clear way for applicants to add family members once their work permits are approved as hinted at on the IRCC landing page for the Canada H1B work permit. 

10. No intake tracker and no information on the number of applications received.

    Not having an application submission tracker will have lead to many people starting applications, and spending hours to complete them, only to find they were unable to submit the application because the cap was reached. If any application initiated was allowed to be submitted, it is likely the department will have received 15,000 to 20,000 applications versus the desired 10,000. There was no reason not to include some form of tracker and post that on the landing page or connect a tracker to the IRCC Portal in some way.

What’s next?

Whether you successfully filed your application and are now wondering what’s next, or whether you experienced problems filing your H1B application and think you made a mistake, book a consult today and we can help.