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As an immigration practitioner, my non-litigation work is mostly consulting potential aspirants who want to make Canada their new home. Not surprisingly, many of them are from my own community, Bangladesh.
A typical consultation often goes like this: Rumi and Sumi on video conference — a young, dynamic couple in their early 30s. Rumi is the principal applicant. They both have master’s degrees, strong English, and more than five years of skilled work experience. When the Express Entry system was launched in 2015, the message was simple: Canada wanted young, skilled, experienced people with strong language ability. On paper, Rumi and Sumi are the perfect fit. They look like the model candidates Canada said it wanted.
The ground reality today is very different. The aspiration of the system on paper no longer lines up with the year-on-year data. In many consultations, I now find myself explaining why Canada may not be the right destination at this moment for profiles like theirs. It is no longer true that being young, skilled, and experienced is enough to make it through Express Entry. If anything, the data now shows that unless you fall into a specific set of in-demand categories, it is very unlikely to receive an invitation from outside Canada. Similarly, those trying to transition to PR from inside Canada are not in an advantageous situation that they would have otherwise expected.
The old shortcuts are gone
For years, some candidates in Canada paid for fraudulent job offers to claim an extra 50 CRS points through the LMIA system — inflated salaries on paper, cash demanded back under the table. In March 2025, IRCC removed the arranged employment bonus entirely. The collateral damage: legitimate workers with genuine job offers lost those points too.
Meanwhile, temporary residents in Canada who only have a bachelor’s degree from a Canadian university plus one year of Canadian work experience are no longer competitive in the pool.
The category game
For its first eight years, Express Entry operated on a simple principle: candidates entered a single pool, were ranked by their Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score, and the highest-scoring profiles received invitations in periodic draws. Your occupation, your industry, your specific skill set — none of it mattered. If your number was high enough, you got in. In 2023, IRCC introduced category-based selection — a fundamental redesign of how invitations are issued. For the first time, the government could run targeted draws for specific groups: French speakers, healthcare workers, tradespeople, STEM professionals, and others. Instead of one pool with one cutoff, there were now multiple streams, each with its own threshold. The old system asked: how high is your score? The new system increasingly asks: what kind of candidate are you?
In its first year, category-based draws accounted for a modest share of invitations — STEM was the headline category. By 2024, they made up 43% of all ITAs. By 2025, 59%. The shift was decisive. French language proficiency alone accounted for roughly 48,000 invitations in 2025, with CRS cutoffs dropping as low as 379. Meanwhile, despite falling withing the priority category, IRCC held zero STEM draws the entire year. Not one.
The last general draw — the old system where everyone competed in one pool on CRS score alone — was held on April 23, 2024. There has not been one since. General draws are not paused. They are, for practical purposes, gone.
Why French?
The federal government has committed to growing Francophone immigration outside Quebec, with rising targets through 2028. This is not a temporary emphasis — it is a structural policy commitment with institutional weight behind it. Category-based selection is the main tool to hit those targets, and the draw data confirms it: French is now the single largest invitation category in the system.
Whatever one thinks of the policy, the practical message for the average aspirant is straightforward: French is now a core selection lever, not a cosmetic skill.
What 2026 looks like
Canada is no longer expanding. PR targets have been cut and frozen at 380,000 through 2028. Temporary resident arrivals are being slashed — down 43 percent from 2025 to 2026. This is a government that has decided it brought in too many people too fast and is now correcting course. A sudden, generous expansion of Express Entry invitations would be entirely inconsistent with that direction.
Early 2026 data confirms the pattern. On February 6, IRCC issued 8,500 French-language invitations at CRS 400. Large CEC draws continue. No general draws. No sign of a major change in course.
So what should Rumi and Sumi do?
For now, we are working with a system whose stated aspiration still talks about “young, skilled, high language” candidates in general terms, but whose actual selection strongly favours a narrower circle: in-Canada workers through CEC, provincial nominees through PNP, French-speaking candidates, and people in a limited set of officially prioritised occupations.
If you are outside Canada, you are not in healthcare or education, and you do not have a provincial nomination — the data is pointing in one direction. Learn French. Not because it is a hack or a shortcut, but because it is the one category where eligibility is entirely in your hands and the numbers have been consistently generous. A candidate with CRS 400 and NCLC 7 in French received an invitation last month. A candidate with CRS 520 and no French did not.
That comparison is not opinion. It is what every draw in the last eighteen months shows.
Rumi and Sumi ended the call hoping I could work some magic. But I am a lawyer, not a magician. The system is not broken — it has simply moved, and it has moved away from them.
They have two master’s degrees, strong English, and years of experience. But they grew up in Bangladesh, where English was the second language, not French. Learning an entirely new language as working adults with full-time commitments is not a weekend project. It may not even be feasible.
And here is the part that stays with me after the screen goes dark: if Rumi and Sumi had grown up in Casablanca instead of Dhaka — same degrees, same experience, same ambition — their Express Entry story would already be over. They would have received an invitation months ago.
I do not sell dreams in my practice. But I do not think it is my place to close doors either. I lay out what the data shows, what the policy rewards, and what the gaps are. The rest belongs to them.
Nabil Ahsan is an immigration lawyer called to the bar of the Law Society of Ontario. He can be reached at info@nahsan.ca or on LinkedIn.
Sources: IRCC Express Entry Year-End Reports (2023, 2024), IRCC Rounds of Invitations data, 2025–2027 and 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plans, CIC News year-in-review reporting, IRCC Report to Parliament on category-based selection. Early 2026 data from published draw results. Predictions are based on observed patterns and policy direction and cannot be guaranteed.
