OTTAWA — Canada is hoping to poach top tech talent from the U.S. with a new accelerated immigration program for H-1B visa holders, even as it reels back the number of new temporary residents allowed into the country.

The U.S. offers H-1B visas to foreign workers with highly specialized skills, 65 per cent of whom worked in tech as of 2023. In September, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to impose a US$100,000 fee on businesses looking to hire a foreign worker under the program as part of his “America First” agenda, arguing foreign talent was displacing American workers.

Prime Minister Mark Carney was quick to seize on the potential opportunity for Canada to lure those workers north, and promised the budget would include a “clear offering” to those whose U.S. visas might not get renewed. “These are people who have lots of skills, that are enterprising and they’re willing to move to work,” Carney said at a September press conference in London. 

The budget the federal government unveiled Tuesday offers no details on what that accelerated program might look like, or how it will avoid the pitfalls of past attempts to bring those workers to Canada. The government’s immigration, innovation and employment departments are still developing the program, according to Immigration Department officials who provided a briefing to journalists on the condition they not be named. “Canada will launch an accelerated pathway for H-1B visa holders in the coming months to strengthen our country’s innovation ecosystem, address labour shortages and attract top talent in health care, research, advanced industries and other key sectors,” the department said in a statement on Wednesday.

“In reality, the people who are in the U.S. are very keen to stay in the U.S. and get their green cards,” said Andres Pelenur, founding partner of Borders Law Firm in Toronto. In 2023, Ottawa launched a similar program as part of its Tech Talent Strategy, offering open work permits to H-1B visa holders living in the U.S. Though the program reached its cap of 10,000 applicants within 48 hours, only 1,625 applicants on the new work permit actually arrived in Canada between August 2023 and December 2024, according to data The Logic obtained from the federal Immigration Department. “When it’s time to actually come into Canada and make a whole move to a new country, they didn’t,” Pelenur said. 

Immigration Department officials said they hope to learn from that experience when designing the new program proposed in Tuesday’s budget, which is part of the government’s plan to attract top talent from abroad while establishing more sustainable immigration levels. Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo, has long argued that a less convoluted immigration system would eliminate the need for special programs like the one set out in the budget for H-1B holders, because Canada would easily be able to skim the best and brightest immigration candidates from a ranked list of applicants. “We talk about uncertainty on the business investment side, which is a huge problem. We’re doing the exact same thing on this kind of immigration side, creating a massive amount of uncertainty for people that’s totally unnecessary,” he said. 

The move was lauded, however, by tech industry groups like the Council of Canadian Innovators and Build Canada, an organization of tech leaders launched earlier this year to influence government policy, which pitched the idea in September as a way to attract global talent and stave off attempts by U.S. firms to try to poach Canadians. 

The government said the goal is to reduce the number of temporary residents to less than five per cent of the population, and to restrict new permanent residents to less than one per cent of the population per year. 

The Liberal government also hopes to make sure that more of those new permanent residents arrive through economic immigration programs to help spur growth.

One way to make sure Canada can accomplish both its goals is to create a path for people who arrive under the new H-1B program to put down roots in Canada, Pelenur said. “We want to bring them here and get them to stay here,” he said. “We need highly skilled people.”

The government has promised more details on the program “in the coming months.”