With 5,000 ITAs, Canada held biggest Express Entry draw ever

On November 18, Canada’s biggest draw sent 5,000 invitations to Express Entry applicants with a minimum Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score cut-off of 472.

In total Canada has issued 92,350 Invitations to Apply (ITAs) this year.

Since few months, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) have been announcing draws of 4,200 every two weeks which has created a history as the immigration department have never had such big draws from February.

The immigration application management system of Canada for three federal economic-class programs is known as Express Entry. The federal economic-class programs are the Federal Skilled Worker Program, Federal Skilled Trades Program, and the Canadian Experience Class.

CRS scores get evaluated from applicant’s human capital factors such as age, education, work experience, and language ability in English or French. CRS score is given to the federal economic-class programs as well as Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs).

An applicant with the highest-ranks in the EE pool receives ITAs in regular invitation rounds.

Tie-break rule was applied in the draw and the timestamp applied was October 27 at 06:18:11 UTC by IRCC. This refers that applicants with a 472 CRS score or above who submitted their profile in the Express Entry pool prior to the decided timestamp receive ITA in the invitation round.

The tie-breaking rule is introduced to manage applications that have the same CRS score. If more than one applicant has the same score, the selection of profile depends on the tie-breaking rule and the first come first serve pattern gets applied.

This year the number of ITAs issued has created a record in the immigration system of Canada as it is the fastest target achieving approach of IRCC. In the history of IRCC’s Express Entry draw announcements, the year ‘2020’ will be noted as an economy shaping year.

The large number of ITAs is in line with Canada’s commitment to welcome over 400,000 new immigrants in 2021, most of them coming through the Express Entry system.