Status of every route

Program status changed more in the past eighteen months than in the previous ten years. Federal nomination allocations were cut by half in 2025 and only partly restored for 2026, and provinces responded by closing business streams to protect their worker streams. This table is the current position.

Province by province

Each block below gives the published thresholds, the sequence you go through, and the thing that decides whether the route suits a particular family. Figures are in Canadian dollars.

Where the door has shut

Ontario has no business immigration route

The Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program suspended its Entrepreneur Stream on 4 December 2023 and never reopened it. On 30 May 2026 amendments to Ontario Regulation 421/17 took effect and repealed all nine nomination categories, the entrepreneur category among them. The former stream page now redirects to the government's web archive. On 26 June 2026 the eight remaining worker and graduate streams closed permanently, and on 4 August 2026 the Ontario Workforce Priority Stream opened as the only live route.

That stream is employer-driven and explicitly excludes self-employed applicants and anyone without an employer and employee relationship, with an exception for physicians. Ontario has signalled a redesigned programme that may include an entrepreneur stream, but has published no criteria, no thresholds and no launch date. Any advertised Ontario entrepreneur pathway in 2026 does not exist.

Saskatchewan closed permanently

On 27 March 2025 Saskatchewan closed the Entrepreneur, International Graduate Entrepreneur and Farm Owner and Operator categories permanently. Applications already in the system continue to completion. No reopening has been announced. The programme navigation still lists the categories, which misleads people; every underlying page carries the closure notice.

Federal routes and work permits

What happened to the Start-Up Visa

New applications stopped on 1 January 2026. Holders of a valid 2025 commitment certificate had until 30 June 2026 to file, and on that date the programme was paused. Applications already accepted continue to be processed, with priority given to files backed by designated investors over incubator-only files, and to applicants already in Canada on Start-Up Visa work permits. Those permit holders may extend while permanent residence is pending. A replacement pilot for immigrant entrepreneurs has been signalled with details expected during 2026. Nothing has launched as of 29 August 2026, and any specific criteria circulating in the market are speculation.

The C11 work permit is not a permanent residence route

This is the most commonly mis-sold point in Canadian business immigration. The C11 exemption under R205(a) requires the applicant to be seeking temporary residence only, on a temporary or seasonal basis, with a plan to leave Canada. It runs a maximum of 18 months as standard and requires control of at least 51 percent of the business. Applicants pursuing permanent residence use C60, which covers provincial business nominees, or A77 under the Start-Up Business Class. Anyone selling C11 as a path to permanent residence is describing something the instructions specifically exclude.

Owner-operator LMIA

Employment and Social Development Canada ended the owner-operator exemption on 1 April 2021. It has not returned. An owner applying for a labour market impact assessment today is assessed like any other employer, including recruitment and genuineness testing, with no concession for ownership.

Intra-company transfers

For an existing foreign business, the intra-company transferee route is often faster than any entrepreneur stream. C61 covers establishing a new Canadian enterprise and runs one year with no extension. C62 covers executives and senior managers, up to three years initially with two-year renewals to a seven-year cap. C63 covers specialised knowledge workers with a five-year cap. All three require one year of continuous full-time employment abroad in a similar role within the preceding three years, a qualifying parent, subsidiary, branch or affiliate relationship, and a multinational with revenue-generating operations in at least two countries. Supplier arrangements, licensing deals and franchise agreements do not create a qualifying relationship, and a Canadian entity without physical commercial premises will fail.

Full comparison table

Sorted by net worth, then investment. Graduate pathways sit at the bottom because they ask for no capital and buy that with a much higher language bar and a Canadian credential.

Canada against citizenship and residency by investment

The table below sets the Canadian numbers against what the same capital buys elsewhere.

The three things that actually separate them

1. Canada asks for your life, not just your capital. Every provincial stream requires you to live there, manage the business in person, and hire locally. New Brunswick wants you within 100 kilometres of the business. Prince Edward Island wants 274 days a year. Caribbean citizenship asks for nothing beyond due diligence, and in most cases not even a visit.
2. Canada delivers a passport, eventually. Permanent residence converts to citizenship after three years of physical presence, and a Canadian passport is worth considerably more than any programme in the table. Portugal now takes ten years for most non-EU nationals, counted from the date the first permit issues rather than from application. New Zealand and Greece do not realistically convert to citizenship at all on minimal-presence settings.
3. The published processing times are not the real ones. St Lucia's official guidance says 90 days; measured data across recent applications says eighteen months. Portugal's statutory decision period says 90 days; the actual queue runs years. British Columbia publishes stage times that sum to several years and no end-to-end figure at all. I quote clients the measured number, not the advertised one.

Most families need two documents, not one

The question I am asked is usually "which programme should I do". The better question is what each document is for, because a family under pressure normally needs two things that no single programme delivers at once.

The first is a travel document, and you need it soon. A passport that lets you board a plane, open a bank account, register a company, and move without waiting on a visa appointment in a country you are trying to leave. Caribbean citizenship does this in five to eighteen months. São Tomé and Príncipe is being marketed as a cheaper version at around US$90,000 and it does produce a passport, but it opens roughly 71 destinations with no Schengen, no United Kingdom, no United States and no Canada, and the programme is barely a year old with approvals in the tens. It is a document, not mobility. I will explain it to a client who asks and I will tell them plainly what it does not do.

The second is the place the family actually ends up. Where the children go to school and where the tax residence eventually sits. That is Canada, Australia, or a European residence that genuinely converts to citizenship. These take years and require you to move.

Running both at once is normal and there is no conflict between them. A family takes St Kitts and Nevis or Grenada for the travel document, and files a New Brunswick or Nova Scotia business application, or an Australian National Innovation visa, for the destination. The first buys freedom of movement during the years the second one takes. We build both halves of that plan in-house, which is the reason to have one advisor across the whole picture rather than a different firm for each document.

What else we advise on

This page covers Canadian business immigration and sets it against the investment migration alternatives. It is one part of what we do. The rest:

The business itself, not only the application

Every stream on this page requires a real business, and that is where most families stall. Choosing what to run in a province you have never lived in is a harder problem than filling in the forms, and no application consultant solves it for you.

We work on both halves. If you would rather buy something already operating, with staff, customers and a trading history, we have access to businesses available for purchase across the provinces where these streams run, and we can assess whether a given one satisfies the programme as well as whether it is worth owning. If you would rather build, we can put you in front of people who open and grow businesses on the ground in the province you are moving to, and stay with it past the point of approval.

A business plan that satisfies a programme officer and a business that actually works are two different documents. You need both, and the second one is the one you live in.

How I would choose between them

Most families arrive at this decision having already been sold one answer. Here is the sorting I actually use.

If the goal is a Canadian passport for the family

Look at the provinces where you would genuinely live, not the ones with the lowest number. A business you do not want to run in a town you do not want to live in fails the performance agreement, and a failed performance agreement costs you the years as well as the money. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia outside Halifax and rural Alberta are the strongest combinations of achievable thresholds and real economies.

If the goal is mobility this year

Canada cannot deliver it. Nothing in the provincial system produces status in under three years. St Kitts and Nevis at five months, or Grenada if a US E-2 treaty matters, does what Canada cannot. Families frequently take Caribbean citizenship for the travel document and start a Canadian provincial file in parallel, and there is no conflict between the two.

If you already own a business abroad

Test the intra-company transfer route before any entrepreneur stream. If your company has revenue-generating operations in two countries and you have a year of qualifying employment, C62 or C63 gets you into Canada in months rather than years, and provincial nomination or Express Entry can follow from inside the country. This is where most of our Canadian work sits.

If someone has quoted you a C11 work permit as a route to permanent residence

Ask them to show you the instruction that permits it. They cannot, because it says the opposite.

Questions people actually ask

Sources and verification

Every figure on this page was checked against the issuing government's own publication on 29 August 2026. Programme thresholds change without notice, and several provinces amended theirs during 2026. Confirm current requirements before acting.

• British Columbia: WelcomeBC Entrepreneur Immigration and the BC PNP invitations to apply record
• Alberta: AAIP programme updates and the AAIP processing information page
• Manitoba: Business Investor Stream Entrepreneur Pathway and Farm Investor Pathway programme guides
• New Brunswick: NB Business Immigration Stream guide, March 2025
• Nova Scotia: Entrepreneur stream and the NSNP Entrepreneur Stream application guide
• Newfoundland and Labrador: International Entrepreneur eligibility criteria
• Prince Edward Island: Business Impact Category application guide, and direct correspondence with the PEI Office of Immigration
• Yukon: Yukon Business Nominee Program
• Northwest Territories: NTNP Business Stream
• Saskatchewan: SINP closure notice, 27 March 2025
• Ontario: 2026 OINP updates and Ontario Regulation 421/17 as amended
• Federal: Start-Up Visa , the R205(a) C11 programme delivery instructions, the intra-company transferee instructions, and the 2026 to 2028 Immigration Levels Plan
• Citizenship and residency by investment: the citizenship by investment units of St Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda and St Lucia; Grenada's Investment Migration Agency; Portugal's Diário da República and AIMA; Greece's Ministry of Migration and Asylum; Australian Department of Home Affairs; Immigration New Zealand; UAE GDRFA and ICP