OTTAWA — A pilot immigration program to help rural communities find skilled workers for hard-to-fill jobs saw 800 people receive permanent residency in the first two months of this year — and hundreds of applications are streaming in for a limited number of available spaces.

The Rural Community Immigration Pilot, or RCIP, began in 2025. It allows 14 small communities across Canada to recommend people with skills and jobs in selected sectors for permanent residency.

Each community can select up to 25 fields as priority professions for their area — anything from health and manufacturing to skilled trades and transport.

Ward Mercer, RCIP program manager for the North Okanagan Shuswap region in British Columbia, said his region recommended 340 people for permanent residency through the program last year and 90 of them had received PR status as of Feb. 28.

He said the number of immigrants looking for permanent residency “massively outpaces” the number of spaces available, so the community had to be strategic when selecting which professions would be prioritized.

His region is seeking early childhood educators, auto mechanics, people in the construction trades and social workers.

“When we look at the labour market as a whole, we recognize that there were some areas where there (were) pre-existing foreign nationals who needed to be transitioned to permanent residents,” Mercer said.

“But we also noticed that there were vacancies and hard to fill positions that could be filled by foreign nationals because there’s no local labour force there.”

North Okanagan Shuswap had a population of about 136,000 in 2021, according to the census. Mercer said it has a bit of a retirement community feel, with “a huge portion” of the population not in the local workforce due to age.

It’s a similar story on the other side of the country in Pictou County, N.S., which had a population of about 44,000 in 2021.

Becky Cowen, Pictou County Partnership director of immigration and community integration, said the county is a regional hub for manufacturing but jobs are hard to fill with an aging population.

“Even without out-migration, we would still require immigration to come and support and stabilize our workforce,” Cowen said.

“We do have manufacturers that are quite niche, and it’s really hard to recruit somebody with those skill sets. And the majority of their workforce is in their late ’40s, ’50s. So you can kind of see without having new people coming to the region with those skill sets, it’s going to be really hard for them to retain and grow their businesses.”

Cowen added that many of the 70 people Pictou County has recommended for permanent residency so far were already living and working in the area as temporary foreign workers. She said the RCIP is acting more as a worker retention program than a means to attract new people to the region.

Samuel Solomon, immigration and workforce development specialist with Economic Development Brandon, in Manitoba, said his city is also using the program to attract and retain temporary workers already in Canada for skilled manufacturing jobs.

He said virtually all 59 people his agency has recommended for permanent residency, along with their families, were already in Canada on work visas.

Solomon said several of the jobs being filled have been vacant for a long time. The city of Brandon is also using the program to fill roles in the health sector, including doctors.

“We’ve been able to attract physicians coming through the program. One physician in Brandon serves over 2,000 people on average, so the impact has been already been felt in the short period of time,” Solomon said.

“We do encourage employers to continue supporting local candidates, especially the youth. We do have employment agencies within the city, so employers have to seek those agencies before seeking to hire from abroad.”

Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. has had 200 permanent residents approved through RCIP, the highest number of all the 14 participating communities. It recommended more than 400 for permanent residency.

Travis Anderson, Sault Ste. Marie community development director, said his city, which has a population of about 77,000, has long struggled to attract talent from southern Ontario, so it needed to look further afield.

“I think people do view it as, unfortunately, still as rural or remote. So for us, it has just been, not for lack of trying, there’s always been this gap in terms of our ability to recruit from elsewhere in Ontario,” Anderson said.

He said the program has succeeded in attracting health care, transportation and hospitality professionals. Anderson said the program does not cover low-skill positions and Sault Ste. Marie does not allow fast food jobs in its program.

With many young Canadians still struggling to find jobs — youth unemployment in May was at 13.4 per cent, more than double the national average — some have said Canada should focus its efforts on hiring more young people.

Anderson said northern Ontario has tended to see a lot of its young people move away after school to look for opportunities in bigger cities. There are signs that may be changing, he said, as more young people opt to stay in Sault Ste. Marie after graduation and attend local post-secondary institutions.

RCIP is one of six economic immigration pilots. The others include one seeking francophone immigrants for communities outside Quebec, one looking to get francophone international students to stay after graduation, and separate pilots for caregivers and agriculture workers.

Together, the six economic immigration pilots were allotted about 8,200 permanent residency spaces in 2026. A spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the department doesn’t publish individual permanent residency targets for the various pilots.

While some communities like Brandon are seeing demand in line with the number of residency spots available, bigger centres in provinces like B.C. and Ontario are seeing demand outstrip the number of spaces.

“We are on pace at this point to receive potentially over 7,500 applications at the end of five years. We can only recommend 330 to 350 people a year,” Mercer said.

He said that demand is driven in part by broader cuts to immigration, which have pushed many people looking to become permanent residents to apply under RCIP.

Mercer said that while his community has seen some highly qualified candidates come through the program, there is a human cost for those with a less certain pathway to life in Canada.

“People come here and they are begging to use this program, and there’s opportunity there for people to take advantage of them,” he said.

“I think it’s an interesting look at the knock-on impacts of federal policy down all the way to a regional level and a regional pilot.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 14, 2026.

David Baxter, The Canadian Press