Two things are true about Canadian immigration this month, and they do not sound like they belong in the same paragraph.
The first: this is the widest year for provincial nomination in the program's history. The 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan set the Provincial Nominee Program admissions target at 91,500 — a 66% increase over the previous plan, which had cut it to 55,000. Ontario's own allocation rose to 14,119, the largest it has ever held.
The second: Ontario has not issued a single invitation since 30 April 2026.
Both of those come from the governments involved, not from a forecast. What follows is what the rest of the draw data says, where it came from, and the date it was read.
Ontario has been dark for sixteen weeks
The sequence matters, because it is easy to read the silence as a backlog and it isn't one.
On 30 April, Ontario ran an Employer Job Offer round for the Greater Toronto Area. That was the last invitation round under the old program. On 26 June the province amended its regulation to remove all eight existing OINP streams at once, replacing them with a single Ontario Workforce Priority stream. The expression-of-interest system closed to new registrations the same day. On 4 August the new EOI portal opened.
As of today, no invitation round has been held under the new stream. Ontario publishes no draw schedule and gives no advance notice.
If your plan was Ontario, three things about the new stream are worth knowing now rather than later:
- Your employer moves first. The employer registers the job offer through the OINP Employer Portal, which generates the job offer ID. You cannot file an expression of interest without it. This inverts the old order, and it means your timeline is not fully yours.
- The clocks are short. Once the job offer is registered you have 30 calendar days to file your EOI. If an invitation follows, the employer has 14 days to get the position approved and you have 17 to submit and pay.
- A larger allocation is not a lower bar. 14,119 spaces is a record. It says nothing about what score will be invited, because Ontario has never run a round on this grid and therefore has no history to reason from. Anyone quoting you an OINP cut-off score today is inventing it.
You can score yourself against the published Workforce Priority grid — all 130 points of it — on the Ontario calculator. What that gives you is your position, not a prediction.
The federal side has settled into a rhythm
While Ontario rebuilt, IRCC became extremely regular. Express Entry rounds now arrive in three-day clusters, roughly twice a month, in the same order each time: Provincial Nominee, then Canadian Experience Class, then French-language proficiency.
August ran 4th, 5th and 6th, then 17th, 18th and 19th. July ran 6th, 7th and 9th, then 20th, 21st and 22nd. That is not a rule IRCC has published, and it could stop without notice — but it has held all year, and it is a pattern nobody seems to name.
Across 2026 so far: 49 rounds, 119,865 invitations.
Where those invitations actually went
This is the part that surprises people, and it reframes what a "good CRS score" even means.
- French-language proficiency — 50,500 invitations across 10 rounds, at cut-offs between 382 and 420. The single largest channel into permanent residence this year, and by a wide margin the cheapest in CRS terms. The 19 August round took 5,000 people at 382.
- Canadian Experience Class — 49,250 across 14 rounds, cut-offs between 507 and 523. Remarkably stable. If you have Canadian work experience and no French, this is the number your profile is being measured against, and it has barely moved in eight months.
- Provincial Nominee Program — 7,399 across 16 rounds, cut-offs between 708 and 805.
- Category-based rounds made up the rest: Healthcare and Social Services took 8,000 at 467–475, Trades 3,000 at 477, Transport 300 at 470, senior managers with Canadian experience 750 at 392–429, and physicians with Canadian experience 662 at 169–223 — the lowest cut-offs of any round this year by a distance.
The lesson in that list is not "learn French," though it is hard to look at 50,500 invitations at 382 and conclude nothing. It is that the category you are eligible for matters more than your score. A 480 is nowhere near a CEC round and comfortably inside a healthcare one.
Subtract six hundred
Provincial Nominee rounds cut off in the 700s and 800s, and every month someone sees 805 and concludes permanent residence is unreachable. It is the most common misreading in this whole field.
An enhanced provincial nomination adds 600 CRS points. That is what the round is measuring. Subtract it and you get what the invited candidates actually held on their own merits:
- The 17 August round cut off at 760 — candidates were sitting at about 160.
- Across all sixteen 2026 rounds, the range after subtracting 600 has been roughly 108 to 205.
A CRS of 160 is not a strong federal profile. It is not close to a CEC round. The nomination is doing all of the work — which is precisely the point of chasing one. A nomination does not improve your ranking; it removes ranking as the obstacle.
Worth restating plainly, because it is where the 600 points get oversold: the province nominates, and only IRCC can grant permanent residence. The 600 points apply in TEER 0–3 and only if you also qualify under a federal Express Entry program and take the nomination through it.
British Columbia is getting cheaper
BC selects by category rather than in one general round, so a single draw date produces several different minimums. Between the 9 July and 6 August rounds, every repeated category came down:
- Construction Trades — 97 to 88, with 187 invited
- Childcare — 108 to 102, with 183 invited
- Health — 96 to 84, with 124 invited, the lowest Care: Health minimum recorded in 2026
- Veterinary Care — 88 to 72
Then on 20 August BC ran its High Economic Impact rounds: 337 invitations on a wage basis, and 265 more at a minimum score of 132.
Four categories falling together in one cycle is a pattern, not noise. It is consistent with a province working through a larger allocation, and it is the kind of movement that never shows up if you only ever read the current number.
Alberta draws almost weekly, at scores that look impossible
Alberta ran five rounds between 4 and 12 August, issuing 367 invitations: Rural Renewal at a minimum of 51, agriculture at 55, tech and dedicated health care at 60, priority-sector health care at 66.
Those figures are not comparable to British Columbia's. The AAIP grid is scored out of 100; BC's is out of 200. Comparing a 51 in Alberta to an 84 in BC is meaningless, and any site that ranks provinces by minimum score is telling you nothing.
Two things temper the low numbers. Alberta states plainly that the EOI score is not the only factor it selects on, so clearing a published minimum guarantees nothing. And the arithmetic is tight: as of 12 August the province had 2,419 nomination spaces left for the year against a worker pool of 36,932 profiles.
What this means if you are in a pool right now
Nothing here predicts a cut-off, and the honest version of this section is short.
The route is wider than it has been in years, but width arrived unevenly. If you are waiting on Ontario, you are waiting on a program that has run zero rounds on its new grid, and no amount of profile-polishing changes that — the actionable step is getting your employer through the Employer Portal, because nothing else can start until that does. If you are in British Columbia's pool, the trend in your category is currently your friend. If you are in Alberta's, the pool-to-spaces ratio is the number to watch, not the minimum score.
And if you have French at a level you have been assuming is not good enough, get it tested. 50,500 invitations went out this year at scores a great many people already hold.
What nobody can tell you
Provinces do not publish pass marks. They do not announce draws in advance. Cut-offs move with whoever is in the pool that day, and a number that held for six rounds can move eighty points in the seventh — as Ontario's own history shows, an entire program can be deleted between one round and the next.
Every figure above carries the date it was read and a link to the government page it came from. The draws page keeps the federal rounds live from IRCC's feed and the provincial rounds stamped with the day each province was last checked. Scoring is not eligibility, and neither is a strong position in a pool — for that you need a licensed RCIC.