Sponsorship used to be a pain to deal with. It's much worse now. In my opinion it is almost always not worth dealing with. I have people try to make the case all the time that with NAFTA, a TN Visa is no problem, but not clients. A great client took the time this week to lay out the sponsorship situation from a Canadian company taking someone from the US or another country and I thought this would be well worth sharing.

"There are 2 steps and the first is rather lengthy. A company must prove "significant benefit" to Canada, through a series of steps (attempts at recruiting being one) prior to making an application to HRSDC for a Labour Market Opinion ("LMO") Various forms of "proof" are required to show HRSDC at this stage. A company MUST have an LMO prior to recruiting someone from abroad. The LMO can be requested prior to identifying an individual, or after. HRSDC can accept or reject the LMO request. This process (I've described VERY briefly) can take up to 6 months.

Once the LMO is accepted (and HRSDC determines the length of time a work permit can be allowed) only THEN does the Work Permit go through to CIC (Canada Immigration). A full Work Permit application needs to be made, showing (again) various proofs of an individual's credentials. The length of time a company waits for this can vary, depending upon the country of the employee's origin and where the application needs to be submitted. Some countries also require "visa's" and this is an added step (and time).

Regardless of whether our company has offices in Canada and the U.S., the provisions for hiring are similar in both countries (NAFTA).

So - "sponsorship" isn't something that can easily happen just because we find someone we like from abroad. With the economic downturn, HRSDC has started to deny LMO is droves, or they are requiring that companies prove larger "proofs".. and thusly, more time is required to gather it."

This is a brief description but helps to give us the clients' perspective when dealing with sponsorship. It's easy to see why they want recruiting help and why they want us to be able to find people where sponsorship won't be needed.


Todd Kmiec
Todd Kmiec & Associates
todd@toddkmiec.com
919-883-7560

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