The federal Immigration Department halted a pilot program that matched skilled refugees with job vacancies and granted them permanent residency, leaving Canadian businesses and fresh hires in limbo days before Christmas.

The unexpected decision to pause the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot, communicated last week in a letter to groups involved in the program, has dismayed and surprised non-profit recruiters matching displaced people with employers in Canada.

In its notice, the government cited a large backlog in explaining the policy change.

The decision was made as Ottawa has come under pressure to curb migration. The Prime Minister made it clear in his mandate letters to ministers earlier this year that he wants the government to attract global talent to Canada.

On Dec. 19, the government paused, “until further notice,” a similar immigration pilot program designed to fill labour gaps in home care for seniors, children and people with disabilities. The Home Care Worker Immigration Pilots were halted because demand from care workers for permanent residence exceeded the number of places available in the government’s immigration targets plan.

The Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot was launched in 2018 and has brought engineers, nurses and artisans to Canada. It has also welcomed displaced workers with experience in skilled trades and technical roles to fill vacancies, including in remote communities.

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The government has said it would admit 2,000 skilled refugees and their families under the pilot program. From 2019 to the end of March, 2025, 970 people had been admitted to Canada as a result.

The pausing of the program, with no restart date, leaves businesses hoping to fill job vacancies and refugees with job offers waiting in limbo, according to professionals working with the program.

On Dec. 23, a senior official with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada wrote to organizations involved in matching Canadian employers with refugees, informing them that applications to join the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot would be halted at the end of December, but officials would work on processing the applications backlog.

The e-mail, from senior IRCC official David Léger St-Cyr, said attracting “the best talent in the world to help build the economy while returning to sustainable immigration levels” is a key government priority.

However, Mr. St-Cyr wrote that there would be no new applications while the department works on a “sustainable and effective permanent program that will continue to benefit both clients and employers.”

He wrote that there is a “large inventory of applications and growing processing and wait times,” and the pause on new intake into the program would help the government deal with the backlog.

“These measures will allow us to process the applications currently in the inventory and stem further inventory growth,” he added.

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The letter said that “admission spaces allocated to Federal economic pilots through the 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan are not sufficient to process all the applications currently within the EMPP’s inventory.”

November’s immigration levels plan set out the number of permanent and temporary residents the government plans to accept over the next three years. The plan included specific targets for economic immigration pilots, including the EMPP and another for caregivers.

The government aims to offer 8,175 permanent-residence places through such economic pilots in 2026, and 8,775 in each of the following two years.

Dana Wagner, co-founder of TalentLift, a non-profit international recruitment company that links displaced people with businesses, said being told about the imminent pausing of the program in a letter two days before Christmas was “very disappointing.”

“The program has been working extremely well. But this is a signal that the EMPP is not being treated like a serious economic program or a vehicle for talent attraction. You shouldn’t leave employers such little runway to plan and pivot,” she said.

“Sending a letter right before Christmas when the government signs off for the holiday is an awful way to communicate such a major change at the 11th hour.”

Several employers that have already offered jobs to displaced people abroad were planning to submit their paperwork to IRCC in January, Ms. Wagner said.

She said those employers include an auto body collision repair company in British Columbia. It has offered a job to an experienced technician from Venezuela living as a refugee in Ecuador, to fill a local shortage.

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IRCC delays in processing applications have been “ballooning” and now can take up to 17 months, Ms. Wagner said. Many employers are still waiting for skilled refugees they have hired to arrive in Canada.

Among them is Carleton University in Ottawa, which last year hired a refugee from the civil war in Sudan as a visiting professor, to help with research into artificial intelligence, through the pilot pathway.

The refugee, who fled to Somalia, holds a PhD in wireless communications and network engineering and has researched the impact of AI and machine-learning-based algorithms on wireless communication systems. Norah Vollmer, Carleton’s manager of faculty affairs, said her application is still being processed.

IRCC spokesperson Isabelle Dubois said the government “understands the significance of the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot (EMPP) for refugees and displaced persons, and also for employers and Canadian communities.”

But she said the “volume of applications for this pilot has exceeded available levels space” and the intake of applications will be paused to prevent wait times from growing further.

Ms. Dubois said that for the Home Care Worker Immigration Pilots, demand is also higher than the number of available spots.

“IRCC will continue to process all applications already received, based on the number of spaces available in the Immigration Levels Plan,” she said.

Syed Hussan, spokesperson for the Migrant Rights Network, said the caregiver program “came with a clear promise: provide essential care for our families, and you will be granted permanent residency.”

“Care workers, largely racialized women, sacrificed everything and uprooted their families because of this promise,” he said in an e-mail. “Now the government has changed the rules mid-stream, throwing them into crisis.”