"Which province is easiest?" is the most-asked question in Canadian provincial immigration and the least answerable, because the provinces do not score the same things. So instead of answering it, here is one person put through all three grids.
The profile. A registered nurse, 31 years old. Master's degree, earned outside Canada. CLB 8 across all four language abilities, no French. Four years in the occupation, one of them in Canada, currently employed by the employer making the offer. Licensed in the province. Offered $42.00 an hour in a mid-size city outside the province's largest metro.
Nothing exotic. A good, ordinary candidate.
The totals
| Score | Out of | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Ontario — Workforce Priority | 102 | 130 | 78% |
| Alberta — Worker EOI | 71 | 100 | 71% |
| British Columbia — Skills Immigration | 140 | 200 | 70% |
Eight percentage points separate the best and worst outcome for the same human being. That is close enough that "which is easiest" is the wrong question — and the *composition* of those totals is where the real answer lives.
Where each province took its points
Ontario — 102 of 130. Full marks on wage, occupational category, TEER, legal status and Canadian earnings. It loses on things this candidate simply does not have: no Canadian credential (0 of 10), one official language rather than two (5 of 10), and a mid-size city rather than the north (10 of 15).
British Columbia — 140 of 200. Near-full on experience (36 of 40) and a perfect 25 on area of employment. And then the wage: 27 out of 55.
Alberta — 71 of 100. Perfect on work experience, age, location and regulated occupation. Loses on education (10 of 22) and on having no family in Alberta (0 of 8).
The single most useful number here
$42.00 an hour is full marks in Ontario and 49% in British Columbia.
Ontario's wage factor tops out at $40.00 — anything above that scores the maximum 15 of 15. B.C. stakes 55 of its 200 points on wage, more than a quarter of the entire grid, on a ladder that climbs one point per dollar all the way to $70.00. At $42 our nurse collects 27 of them.
To max B.C.'s wage factor you need $70.00 an hour. To max Ontario's you need $40.00. The same offer letter is a ceiling in one province and a little over halfway in the other.
This is the mechanism behind most bad advice in this space. Someone who moved to B.C. on a high wage will tell you B.C. is generous, because for them it was. Someone on a median wage found the same grid unforgiving. Both are describing the same table.
The three disagreements that matter
Wage. Decisive in B.C. (55 points), moderate in Ontario (15), and not scored at all in Alberta. Alberta's Worker EOI grid contains no wage factor. If your leverage is that you are well paid, B.C. rewards it and Alberta is indifferent.
Where your education came from. Alberta pays up to 10 points for completing your credential in Alberta and 6 elsewhere in Canada — but our nurse studied abroad, so that is 0, and it is why a master's degree yields only 10 of Alberta's 22 education points. B.C. does the same thing with 8 points for a B.C. credential. Ontario's education factor does not care where you studied; it has a separate 10-point factor for holding a Canadian credential at all, which is likewise 0 here.
Three provinces, three different penalties for the same foreign degree.
Certification. Alberta pays 10 points — a tenth of its entire grid — for holding the provincial licence in a regulated occupation. B.C. pays 5. Ontario has no equivalent factor. For a nurse, an engineer, an electrician, this is the factor most likely to be sitting unclaimed.
What this means if you are choosing
- Well paid? B.C. rewards it more than anywhere else, and it is the only province where pushing the offer from $50 to $55 is worth 5 points.
- Licensed in a regulated occupation? Alberta pays the most for it and asks nothing about your wage.
- Studied in Canada? Alberta and B.C. both pay for it directly; Ontario pays for it through a different factor. Do not let it go unclaimed anywhere.
- In a big city by default? Every one of these grids pays you to be somewhere else, by a different mechanism and a different amount.
- Score yourself on more than one. The totals here land within eight points, which means the deciding factor is not the province. It is which grid happens to reward what you already have.
Run your own numbers: Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta. Free, no sign-up, nothing stored.
Sources and method
Every figure above is computed from the three published grids as this site encodes them — the same machine-readable files that drive the calculators, so an article and a calculator cannot disagree. Ontario verified 2026-07-30, British Columbia 2026-08-01, Alberta 2026-08-07, each against the province's own document.
None of these provinces publishes a cut-off score, and the percentages above are shares of each grid's maximum, not a probability of being invited. Scoring and eligibility are separate tests and this models only the first.