Milafe Buton, a nanny who came to Canada in 2020 under the Temporary Foreign Worker program, is photographed in in Coquitlam, B.C., on December 31, 2025. (Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail)Jennifer Gauthier/The Globe and Mail
The federal government is pausing an immigration stream that allows caregivers to settle permanently in the country, a departure from decades of dedicated pathways that granted permanent residency to those who look after the young and elderly.
Starting in 2026, Ottawa is suspending the Home Care Worker Immigration pilot projects, saying that demand for the program far exceeded spaces available to grant applicants permanent residency.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said in a statement to The Globe and Mail that it would focus on processing existing applications and has no plans to reopen the program – which has an annual intake cap of 5,500 people – in 2026.
The federal government’s decision to suspend the program means that for the first time in more than 30 years, Canada will not have a dedicated program to bring in home caregivers – bucking a decades-long trend of tapping foreign labour to serve the country’s aging population. The government announced the decision on Dec. 19.
And it comes at a time of rising labour needs in health care. Nearly 14 per cent of Canada’s workers are employed in health care and social assistance, according to Statistics Canada data, up from 10 per cent in 2001.
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“It is frankly very odd. The suspension will have a really serious impact on Canadian families looking for help to take care of their young kids, parents who are aging or have disabilities,” said Alicia Massie, a labour and economics researcher at Simon Fraser University who has extensively studied immigration patterns related to Canada’s care economy.
Ottawa has clamped down on immigration, after years of strong growth, in response to concerns that link the number of newcomers to housing shortages and the rising cost of living. Starting in 2024, the government made a series of dramatic policy changes, which included slashing the number of new international student visas, reducing the size and scope of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and, more recently, suspending certain immigration streams altogether.
The Home Care Worker Immigration pilots were introduced in June, 2024, and were the latest iteration in a series of caregiver-specific migration pathways into Canada. The pilots consisted of two categories (the Home Child Care Pilot and the Home Support Worker Pilot), and guaranteed permanent residency for a maximum of 5,500 eligible applicants annually.
The programs opened on March 31, 2025, and took applicants on a first-come, first-serve basis. But the rollout was marred by technical difficulties on IRCC’s website, mainly because of the sheer number of people who tried to submit their applications. Many prospective applicants were unable to submit their paperwork before the cap was reached, and they were waiting for the program to open again in March, 2026.
Ms. Massie noted that the suspension of the program will significantly impact foreign caregivers already working in Canadian homes on temporary visas.
“Not only are we not bringing in new caregivers, the people who are already here and providing critical work to families will be forced to leave the country once their current work permits expire,” she explained.
This immigration stream was popular among international students who had entered Canada to pursue education as personal support workers, then secured temporary visas after graduation to work in people’s homes. With the absence of the pilot programs, there are no specific routes for caregivers and support workers to stay in Canada in the long run. As a result, those workers will either leave the country when their visas expire, or remain in Canada and join the undocumented population.
Care is a pressing economic and social issue in Canada, more so as the country’s aging population puts additional pressure on public health systems and the demand for in-home care services rises. A 2021 report from the Canadian Medical Association projected that demand for home care for elders will rise to 1.8 million patients by 2031 from 1.2 million.
Canada has had a dedicated immigration pathway for caregivers since 1992, when the Live-in Caregivers program was introduced by the federal government. The program allowed families to sponsor caregivers from abroad to live with them, but it came under scrutiny by labour advocates for allegations of employer mistreatment, given that a caregiver’s work permit was tied to a single employer. Starting in 2014, the Live-In Caregivers program was replaced by various pilot programs that eliminated the live-in rule and focused on granting permanent residency to caregivers.
But these programs have notoriously long processing times for granting PR status. Research from Ms. Massie that was published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2024 said that average wait times between 2019 and 2023 were 31 to 36 months, far exceeding a government target of 12 months.
As of September, processing times for the Home Care Worker Immigration pilots had expanded to 55 months, among the lengthiest for economic immigration programs, according to data provided by IRCC.
IRCC spokesperson Isabelle Dubois said in a statement that the department understands that pausing the program is disappointing for prospective applicants, but the pause will prevent the backlog of applications from growing further.
The labour advocacy group Migrant Workers Alliance for Change denounced the government’s cancellation of the pilots, saying in a Dec. 22 statement that it was a betrayal to more than 40,000 eligible care workers in Canada who had been locked out of applying due to the program’s intake cap.
Milafe Buton, a nanny who has worked with the same family in Vancouver for the past five years, was counting on submitting her application this coming March. She came to Canada in 2020 as a caregiver under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which offers temporary, closed-work permits that tie workers to a single employer. Ms. Buton’s permit expires in 2027 and she is unsure if her current employer will continue to sponsor her.
It is hard to find individual employers who are willing to complete the paperwork necessary to sponsor a caregiver from overseas through the TFW program, noted Julie Diesta, a former care worker and member of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change. The application can be tedious and costly, she added.
“I’ve paid my taxes and worked hard to raise other people’s children,” said Ms. Buton. “The Home Care Worker program was my only path to staying on permanently in Canada, and now it is gone.”