The Government of Canada has recently announced a new rural and northern immigration pilot as a part of its Express Entry program. The government has also named 11 communities in Canada that have been picked out to participate the Immigration Pilot program for northern and rural areas.

Canada Express Entry – Northern and Rural Immigration Pilot

The Northern and rural pilot has been designed to assist the smaller rural and more remote communities in Canada to attract foreign immigrant workers in both skilled and unskilled categories to Canada and provide them with permanent residence
The communities in the rural areas of Canada provide employment to more than four million job seekers and account for nearly 30 per cent of the GDP of the country, as per the figures released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).
The goal of the pilot program is to assist the rural and northern communities to tide over their labor market shortages, which was caused by declining rate of birth and increasing rate of retirement as well as migration of youth from the rural areas to the urban areas of Canada. The communities that have been selected to be a part of the northern and rural pilot program are based across the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia. According to the IRCC, the decision to select the 11 communities, was to a large extent based on the individual economic and societal needs of the respective communities and the availability of resources to monitor and run the pilot program, which would serve as an example for other provinces and communities to follow suit.
Each of the chosen communities, would be expected to work with a locally selected economic development organization which would help to recruit and assess candidates from the Canada Express Entry program. The candidates would be selected on the basis of the economic needs of the local communities and their ability to integrate into the society of the community. The process for selecting candidates to participate in the pilot program can begin in the fall of this year and the selected candidates would be able to enter Canada from the year 2020. The IRCC announced that the criteria for eligibility for the program would be announced later this year.