IRCC has proposed collapsing the Canadian Experience Class, Federal Skilled Worker and Federal Skilled Trades programs into a single program, and reweighting the CRS around what actually predicts employment outcomes. Four factors worth 135 points were ranked as weak predictors. Nothing has changed yet.
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 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.
On September 3, 2026, IRCC invited 229 physicians with a CRS score as low as 198 — 323 points below the Canadian Experience Class cut-off two days earlier. Here is exactly who the physicians category applies to, and who it does not.
Canada’s two Hong Kong permanent residence pathways stopped accepting applications on August 31, 2026, after receiving 30,315 applications covering 48,560 people. Here is what happens to filed applications, why the open work permit’s May 2029 date is not a PR deadline, and what routes are left.
Canada will issue 408,000 study permits in 2026, 7% below 2025. The provincial allocations total 309,670 application spaces for 180,000 PAL-required permits — and that gap tells you what to expect.