OTTAWA — Canada’s fast-track program for skilled foreign workers had a record year in 2021, amid pitched competition for tech talent. But while employers are increasingly using the expedited stream following a pandemic slump, scale-ups and immigration lawyers say the federal government is still failing to meet its promised turnaround times.

In 2021, employers received approval to fill a record 4,604 positions via the Global Talent Stream (GTS), according to The Logic’s analysis of data from Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC). That’s up by two-thirds from 2020, when the department greenlit 2,747 hires. Companies slowed their use of the program during the pandemic, with travel restrictions and lockdowns preventing prospective recruits from making the move to Canada and firms increasingly willing to let staff work remotely. 

Companies can use the GTS to bring in top specialists or workers to fill in-demand roles like software engineers, web designers and database analysts. The government launched the program in June 2017 after years of complaints from the tech sector that slow immigration processing prevented domestic firms from competing for top foreign candidates. 

Employers bringing in workers via the GTS must commit to creating jobs for Canadian citizens and permanent residents, or paying for their training. The government in turn promised to process initial permissions for companies to use the program in 10 business days and most candidates’ work permits in two weeks.

Scale-up firms say the GTS has helped fill roles as they ramp up hiring in a competitive environment for tech workers. “It’s really a candidates’ market right now, and it’s tough to find folks within Canada with the experience that we’re looking for,” said Brittany Leaper, people and culture manager at 7shifts. Competitive salaries and benefits packages are the norm in the tech sector, “so we really have to pull out all the stops for software developers to get them on board.”

The restaurant scheduling platform has about 280 employees, including some 100 in its home base of Saskatoon. That’s up from 148 in total in January 2021. In the interim, the company has raised $101.5 million in two rounds from the likes of Softbank’s Vision Fund and Enlightened Hospitality Investments. As of last month, 7shifts had used the GTS to hire 14 people this year already. 

Across the country, Kitchener, Ont.-based SkyWatch has also used the program for niche technical roles they couldn’t fill locally. Eight of its 61 staff came through the GTS, from Brazil, Kenya, Nigeria and Peru. “It is an additional pool of talent that we have access to,” said April Clarke, vice-president of people and culture at SkyWatch, a platform for commercial satellite images. She also cited the benefits to the company’s culture of hiring staff with varying backgrounds and experiences.

Employers have primarily used the GTS to bring in tech talent. ESDC has also greenlit 3,680 computer programmer and interactive media developer positions as well as 2,985 software engineer and designer roles. Those two groups make up nearly 45 per cent of the 14,923 total GTS approvals through the end of last year. 

Some scale-up executives say pandemic-related delays have not abated, but record application levels aren’t the problem. “Pre-COVID, we were ecstatic with the Global Talent Stream,” said Christian Weedbrook, CEO of Xanadu. The Toronto-based quantum computing firm had the process of hiring via the program down to four weeks. ”But since COVID, that has been really stretched out.” 

ESDC is now taking three weeks—instead of the promised two—to process initial approvals to use the program, and longer for companies that are new to it or need to update their benefits commitments, according to Andréa de Rocquigny, a Burnaby, B.C.-based partner at dRN Law. 

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is similarly not meeting the two-week timeline to process work permits, she said. “That’s hit-and-miss depending on where you’re filing the application.” One particular challenge: getting an appointment to provide biometrics, particularly in Europe, as the centres that provide the service contend with a wave of Ukrainian refugees.

That comes even as demand for the program is ramping up. In 2020, “the only [applications] we were doing were renewals,” said de Rocquigny. In 2021, there’s been “an uptick, and since the beginning of 2022 [an] even further uptick.”

Employers who submitted applications faced technical issues following an update to ESDC’s technology system last year, leading to processing times of 27 business days in September 2021, department spokesperson Natalie Huneault acknowledged. As of April, the average turnaround was 12 days, compared to the promised 10. 

IRCC has met its two-week processing standard for work permit applications under the broader Global Skills Strategy, of which the GTS is a part, just five per cent of the time over the last two quarters, said spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald. In 65 per cent of cases, it’s taken four to eight weeks. “Application inventories grew during the pandemic while health and travel restrictions were in effect, and it will take some time to fully recover,” MacDonald said, noting the government allocated $85 million in the December 2021 economic update to address delays and backlogs.

Workers arriving under other temporary streams, prospective permanent residents and would-be citizens are all experiencing significant delays, with the department facing a backlog of two million cases. 

In March, the Council of Canadian Innovators, a scale-up lobby group, called for the federal government to drop GTS processing times from two weeks to 48 hours. 

Candidates set to join Halifax-based Proposify typically wait six weeks for work permits, although it’s taken twice that long in some cases, said human resources manager Sheeba Kochhar. The firm, which makes proposal tools for sales teams, employs 71 people and has used the GTS for about 15 staff. 

Still, Kochhar—like Leaper, Clarke and Weedbrook—said the program is an important resource and a significant part of her firm’s recruitment strategy. It’s “super helpful for us to be able to tap into international talent,” she said.