Ottawa has confirmed there is no plan to reopen the Home Care Worker Immigration pilots, effectively killing Canada’s newest, and first in three decades, dedicated pathway for foreign caregivers to become permanent residents, even as the wait time for existing caregiver applicants has stretched to 76 months, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s own published processing data as of September 2026.
The two pilot streams, Home Child Care and Home Support Worker, opened in 2024 with an annual cap of 5,500 applicants apiece and were meant to give temporary foreign caregivers already working in Canadian homes a clear route to permanent status. In a notice posted Dec. 19, 2025, IRCC said interest in the program “continues to exceed the spaces available, leading to longer wait times,” and confirmed the pilots would not reopen intake in March 2026 as originally planned, calling the pause indefinite.
IRCC said it will keep processing the applications already filed “in line with the Immigration Levels Plan,” but offered no figures on how many people are waiting and no timeline for when, or if, new applications might be accepted again. According to IRCC’s own processing-time tracker, roughly 36,900 caregiver permanent residence applicants were waiting for a decision as of September, with a current average wait of 76 months, more than six years, up sharply from a 12-month target and a 31-to-36 month average under the program’s 2019-to-2023 predecessor.
For Milafe Buton, a nanny who has worked in Canada for five years, the closure removed her only clear path to staying permanently. “The Home Care Worker program was my only path to staying permanently in Canada, and now it is gone,” she said, a sentiment the advocacy group Migrant Rights Network echoed in calling the cancellation a betrayal of workers who applied in good faith.
Alicia Massie, a researcher at Simon Fraser University who studies migrant care work, said the suspension “will have a really serious impact on Canadian families” who rely on foreign caregivers for child care and elder care. Massie’s concern points to a demand problem Ottawa’s own numbers underscore: health care and social assistance jobs now make up 14 per cent of Canada’s workforce, up from 10 per cent in 2001, and the number of seniors needing home care is projected to climb to 1.8 million by 2031 from 1.2 million today.
What most coverage of the pause has left out is the program’s place in a much longer history. Caregiver immigration to Canada, dating back to the Live-in Caregiver Program of the 1990s, has long been carried disproportionately by Filipino women, according to Statistics Canada research and academic studies of the sector, women who moved thousands of kilometres to raise Canadian children and care for Canadian seniors, often with years-long separations from their own families built into the bargain. The Home Care Worker pilots were pitched in 2024 as a fix for that program’s worst features: faster processing, an open work permit, family members allowed to come along. Less than two years later, the fix itself has a backlog worse than the program it replaced.
That leaves an estimated 40,000 eligible care workers effectively locked out by the pilots’ intake caps, according to immigration researchers tracking the program, stuck on temporary status while Canada’s need for the work they do keeps growing. IRCC has said only that “any future updates on the program will be shared publicly.” For now, families on both sides of the caregiving relationship, the workers and the households depending on them, are left waiting on a government program that quietly stopped taking new applicants nearly a year ago.
Via The Globe and Mail. Read the original report: Ottawa reverses course on immigration programs for caregivers. Additional data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s official program notices and published processing times.
