Abdullah Aljalout, displaced from his home when war broke out in Syria, spent 10 years working as a maintenance engineer in a factory in Lebanon before finding a path that would change his — and his family’s — future. Through Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB), a global non-profit agency that has partnered with the Government of Canada to implement the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot (EMPP), Aljalout landed a position with a company in Shelburne, Ontario in 2019. In 2022, after COVID restrictions were lifted, he and his wife and their three young children resettled in Dufferin County, about 100 km north west of Toronto. “My wife discovered Talent Beyond Boundaries through social media and I signed up for them,” said Aljalout, who holds a degree in electrical engineering. TBB responded and offered him a job in Shelburne as a maintenance technician at a bottled water production plant. “My job here is according to my experience,” he said. “My team’s responsibility is to keep the production line working and (to make) fixes if any breakdowns happen.” Aljalout applied to come to Canada as an economic immigrant with permanent resident status through the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program. With the number of displaced people surpassing 100 million and insufficient resettlement spaces worldwide, Canada is expanding its non-traditional resettlement program for skilled refugees and other displaced people, the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot (EMPP), to fill in-demand jobs in Canada. The new pathway was announced on March 27 by Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRCC), and will open this summer. It will complement the existing EMPP pathways, in an effort to settle up to 2,000 skilled refugees and their families in Canada in the years to come. IRCC partnered with TBB, which works to match skilled refugees with employers in Canada. TBB has joined with national refugee-led organizations Jumpstart Refugee Talent, TalentLift Canada and other EMPP-implementing partners to expedite the settlement process for newcomers. In most cases, it enables immigrants to move to Canada within six months and promptly start working. TBB works with employers who have job vacancies at every skill level, from entry level positions such as hotel cleaners to specialized roles in a variety of industries, including construction, healthcare, hospitality, and information technology. TBB Canada also works in partnership with Fragomen Canada, which specializes in immigration law and consulting, to facilitate the settlement process. Lara Dyer, Canada Director of TBB, says there are about one million jobs that are vacant in Canada at any given time, making the expansion of the EMPP “a good opportunity to put those two needs together. ” TBB is working on a list of potential candidates who meet the EMPP eligibility requirements, including their occupational code (for immigration purposes) and their availability to work for any employer across Canada. Rasha Abdulsattar, an immigration consultant at One Milestone to Canada Immigration Services, says the number of displaced persons who have come to Canada under the pathway is much lower than the proposed targets. She said her clients are mostly from the Middle East, where the political situation is “complicated” and most displaced people are living in precarious situations. “They are working overtime with survival jobs and do not meet the eligibility criteria,” she said. An example of eligibility criteria being a barrier can potentially be seen with the Atlantic Immigration Program, which requires an applicant to have one year of work experience in a related field sometime within the past three years. Often even those clients who may have once had highly skilled jobs are now trying to eke out a living any way they can while displaced. Abdulsattar hopes the expanded EMPP will address the varied needs of refugees, “so that more skilled refugees take advantage and join the Canadian workforce.” The EMPP is a facilitative measure, where the candidate has to qualify for one of the following immigration programs, as the pathway combines refugee resettlement and economic immigration: According to IRCC, the support provided overseas is tailored to refugees. The selection criteria, including the ability to settle independently in Canada, is assessed using economic immigration requirements. While TBB matches the candidates to employers based on their skills and experience, the employer is expected to offer a full-time, permanent job and contribute to the immigration costs of the new hire (i.e. application fees, immigration consultant fees, etc.).