Canada Organizes Largest Express Entry Draw to Invite 900 Candidates

The coronavirus pandemic adversely affected the immigration rates last year. To make up for the losses, Canada has decided to set higher immigration rates in 2021. The country has already been inviting larger batches of candidates.

Canada is exclusively holding draws for candidates who are already living in Canada. The country has been unable to lift all the coronavirus-related travel restrictions and these draws do not require candidates to travel.

Details of the draw

On June 9, Canada organized a huge Express Entry draw to issue a total of 940 invitations. The selected candidates belonging to the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) will now have the chance to submit their applications for permanent residence.

The country issued invitations to candidates who had already secured provincial nominations. This means that they had received an additional 600 CRS points from their chosen province. As a result, the CRS score cutoff was set at 711. With the 600 points factored out, the PNP candidates in the Express Entry pool were only required to have a minimum of 111 points.

The last PNP-only draw held by Canada saw 500 candidates getting invited, and their minimum CRS score requirement was 713 points. The June 9 draw saw the country issuing 2 times the number of invites.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) had to publish a cutoff time based on the tie-break rule in order to fulfill the administrative requirements. The candidates who managed to obtain the minimum score received invitations only if they had registered their Express Entry profile prior to 09:06:30 UTC, February 16, 2021.