Scoring the Accessibility of Canada’s Economic Immigration Pathways for Applicants in Refugee Circumstances

This project develops an analytical and scoring framework to assess the accessibility of Canada’s economic immigration pathways for people living as refugees and other displaced individuals. It produces comparable scorecards across federal programs and provincial nominee pathways, with the aim of identifying how pathway design affects access and where existing requirements may act as barriers for displaced applicants.

Canada has taken important steps to expand skills-based migration opportunities for displaced populations through the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot (EMPP), launched in 2018. While the EMPP has introduced innovative measures to facilitate access, significant barriers remain across the broader economic immigration system.

Under the latest EMPP public policies, people in refugee situations were still largely unable, in practice, to access temporary (work permit) pathways, Express Entry, and many provincial and territorial nominee pathways. This is because some programs did not fall within the EMPP scope, such as work permit pathways, while others retained requirements – such as in-Canada work experience – that limit access for displaced applicants. As a result, most applicants arrived through newly created federal EMPP streams and a limited number of provincial nominee programs.

Canada paused the EMPP in 2026 as part of an ongoing review and consideration of a future permanent program. As a result, displaced applicants seeking to migrate through skills-based routes must navigate programs that were not designed to accommodate the legal, documentary, and financial constraints associated with displacement. In whatever form the EMPP reopens, its absence has highlighted the narrow alternatives available to anyone with an unconventional profile who is living displaced.

By providing a structured framework and comparative scorecards, the project contributes to ongoing policy discussions on how to expand access to skills-based migration for displaced populations. The findings are intended to support evidence-based policy making and to inform discussions at federal and provincial levels, including potential adjustments to existing immigration pathways and the design of a future EMPP.

The project adopts a structured analytical approach to assess accessibility based on the formal design of economic immigration pathways. It focuses on identifying requirements that may act as barriers for displaced applicants, drawing on both policy and legal analysis and practical knowledge of how pathways operate in practice.

The methodology includes the following main components:

• Identification of key barriers: analysis of program requirements that may constrain access for displaced applicants, drawing on TalentLift’s operational experience and existing knowledge of the displacement context, including challenges in meeting legal, documentary, work experience, and financial requirements.
• Indicator-based assessment: pathways are assessed using a set of indicators that operationalize these barriers and enable a consistent and comparable assessment of accessibility across pathways.
• Scoring and aggregation: each pathway is scored to produce an overall assessment of accessibility at both individual stream and program levels, enabling systematic comparison.
• Scope of analysis: the framework covers federal, provincial, and territorial economic immigration pathways linked to employment, including both permanent and temporary residence pathways, while excluding categories not relevant or comparable (e.g. seasonal, student, or humanitarian pathways);
• Phased implementation and validation: the framework is initially applied to selected pathways and refined through iterative testing and engagement with policy stakeholders.

The project will produce a scoring framework and a series of scorecards assessing the accessibility of federal and provincial economic immigration pathways.

The project will also seek to engage decision-makers on the results of our analysis, including through a policy brief and roundtable discussions, with a view to informing more inclusive design across Canada’s economic immigration pathways for applicants in displacement.