Every federal caregiver route to permanent residence is now closed to new applicants, and Ministerial Instruction 91 runs to March 30, 2030. The shared pilots bucket caregivers draw from was also cut to 8,175 admissions for 2026.
Express Entry’s senior manager category cut off at CRS 389 on September 16 — 130 points below the Canadian Experience Class round held a day earlier. The score has fallen at all three 2026 rounds, and the reason is not that the category is getting easier.
IRCC was holding 99,520 unfinished proof-of-citizenship applications on June 30, 2026, after finishing just 31,980 in the first half of the year. Here is what the official inventory data shows — and why the widely quoted 33-month wait is not confirmed by any published IRCC source.
IRCC says it will not add or remove a single eligible field of study for the post-graduation work permit in 2026, leaving the list at the 920 fields set on July 4, 2025. Here is who the rule catches, who is exempt, and the two places people lose a PGWP they thought they had.
IRCC finalized 860,415 study permit applications in 2023 and 281,865 in 2025, a 67% fall. The decline is concentrated by country: India is down 84% while France and Ghana are rising — and there is no published IRCC refusal rate by country at all.
Since January 21, 2025 a spousal open work permit requires the worker’s permit to have at least 16 months of validity left, and below TEER 1 only 81 TEER 2 and 21 TEER 3 occupations qualify. Here is who is still eligible in 2026, and who is not.
IRCC’s September 2, 2026 update puts study permit processing at 2 weeks from France and 51 weeks from Iran — a 49-week gap on the same application. Here is what that number measures, and what it does not.
IRCC paused Parents and Grandparents Program intake on July 15, 2026, and the program page still says closed. About 60,500 parents and grandparents are already in the queue against an admissions target of 15,000 a year through 2028.