CANADA WORK PERMIT from outside Canada 2020 - The work permit paradox

In today's video, we're going to see how to work in Canada for people who are not currently residing in Canada. So let's get going. Do you need a work permit? To answer this question, think about it this way. If your job is related to an event or punctual performance, then you probably don't need a work permit. That is, for example, if you're an athlete and you come for a tournament or if you're a religious authority and you come for public speaking, things like that. And to be sure, I recommend you check the official list from the Canadian government here. You can see all the different jobs and you can actually submit and answer a quick questionnaire to have the exact answer. All right. So most people do need a work permit because they don't fit into these categories. So let's see which work permits you have. The first one is the open work permit. If you have an open work permit, you can work for any employer in Canada. It doesn't matter if you have a job today under an open work permit and you decide to change jobs, change company, change function, interrupt your job, whatever you want to do, you stop your work permit. It's still valid until its expiry date is employer specific, meaning that if you change your status, your job, or if you lose it, you will also lose your work permit and your visa and your situation in Canada. So who can apply for the open work permit? Here we have mostly post-graduates from Canadian institutions, family members of a temporary resident in Canada. This one is important. We're going to go back to it later. Refugee, refugee claimants or their family member or people from the international experience class. International experience class is a couple of programs designed between Canada and other countries for young people, for example, under 35 to go live for a year or two and they get an open work permit with that. Of all those four categories here, the only one that interests us is family member of refugee, refugee claimants or family members of a temporary resident in Canada. Let's say you're outside of Canada, but your spouse is in Canada under either a refugee status or a temporary resident status that could be students or temporary worker, then you could actually apply as the accompanying spouse for an open work permit. So that's an important thing here to remember. For the rest of the world, you will probably need a closed work permit. And what do you need to apply for that? Mainly the valid job offer in Canada. Valid job offer in Canada means that it's a job offer that has been through a labour market impact assessment, which is LMIA. There are a few exceptions, but most cases you'll need to get the LMIA. And the second thing you need to validate your job offer is the employment contract, which will state the wages, the hours, the fields, etc. But here's a problem. These two things, the labour market impact assessment and the contract come from your employer. And that leads to the work permit paradox, where if you want to apply for work permit, you need a valid job offer. But if you go look for a valid job offer, your employee is going to ask you, well, can you work legally in Canada? And you can't because you need the job offer to apply for the work permit and so on and so forth. The truth is most Canadian employers don't want to do the LMIA just because it's a pain in the ass. They need to advertise on different channels that they can't find candidates in Canada. It costs a thousand dollars. It's a lot of paperwork and most employers don't want to go through it. So the ugly truth is that it's almost impossible to get a work permit in Canada if you're outside of Canada, have no job offer, nor a spouse living in Canada. That's my personal conclusion after eight years in the immigration field. And the only times where I saw it working was for a company that did intra-employee transfers. For example, I had the client who was working in a large corporation in Mexico and they wanted to bring him to Canada. So the company did all the work and eventually he managed to get a close work permit in Canada. That is the ugly truth. There are other ways where you could work in Canada and we discussed them in other videos, but this is it for now. I hope you found that information useful even though a bit depressing, but this is what it is.