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How To Bring Foreign Nationals To Canada Using a PEO solution

The immigration procedure for foreigners is getting tougher and tougher today. Indian nationals can immigrate to Canada using a PEO solution only in case they have a residency permit. This would require them to live and/or work in the country for 5 years and more.

In an ideal scenario there needs to be an employer company that would want to sponsor your work permit and employ you in Canada. This company will need to complete the labor market impact assessment (LMIA) before sending an application for work permit to the immigration service.

The employer company will conclude an agreement with International PEO. And it is preferable for a PEO service company to have an agreement with a Canadian employer company. The employer company will also pay immigration costs and monthly employment costs to a PEO company, which will handle your assignment in Canada.

In case you are operating solely without an employer, it is challenging to use a PEO service to bring foreigners to Canada.
A PEO company can employ and payroll employees without however fulfilling the LMIA.

In case there is an overseas employer that wants to bring Indian citizens to Canada without opening own legal entity there, you need to find a local PEO company that would agree to fulfill the LMIA procedure on your behalf.

The procedures below will need to be followed:

The overall procedure will however take from 4 to 6 months (there are fast-track scenarios but it rarely works with business scenarios – generally it works for very specific scientific projects):

  1. Around 30 days – Labor Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). This needs to prove that these foreigners activity will benefit the Canadian end user.
  2. Position needs to be advertised and results must confirm that the Canadian national with the same expertise and knowledge is not available. Be prepared that advertising is quite tedious.
  3. Another 30 days or maybe more for processing the work permit in case of successful LMIA
  4. Employment procedure, which can be done simultaneously to immigration to streamline the whole process

Legal requirements:

  1. Compensation of specialists to be brought to the country. Based on your job description, the minimum wage will vary across Canada but the top end would be $31.05 per hour. This is around $65,000 as a minimum per year based on a 40 hour work week. With this lower wage, you would really have to justify why their expertise was required – proprietary knowledge of the product or industry and a track record of excellent sales results in a similar market would likely be critical. There will be a ton of people that apply, so it would be critical to tailor the job description to ensure it proves the foreign worker’s expertise.
    For this reason companies may decide to raise the salary to $75,000-80,000 annual in order to reduce the number of applicants. Plus you will need to confirm the foreigners have unique expertise that couldn’t be found in the local market (knowledge of company product, evidence of high performance in the local market are key).
  2. The Canadian government doesn’t allow hiring person as commission-based contractors, so you should have an official employer company – either your own legal entity or a local agency acting on your behalf.
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