You have been working for an Ontario employer on a closed work permit for two years. Your manager wants to keep you, and last spring someone in HR mentioned the “OINP Foreign Worker stream.” If you go looking for it now, you will not find it. Ontario has dismantled the structure most people knew and replaced it with something quite different. This post explains what the employer job offer route to a provincial nomination looks like today.
What changed in 2026
In June 2026 Ontario brought into force the first phase of a redesign of the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program. All of the previous streams were revoked, including the three Employer Job Offer streams (Foreign Worker, International Student and In-Demand Skills), the Express Entry aligned streams, and the Masters and PhD graduate streams. They were replaced by a single Ontario Workforce Priority stream.
Applications filed before the transition continue to be assessed under the rules in place when they were submitted. Everything new runs through the Workforce Priority stream.
The three pathways
The new stream is organised around the job rather than the candidate’s background, and it has three pathways:
- a pathway for workers with job offers in higher-skilled occupations, classified as TEER 0 to 3 under the National Occupational Classification;
- a pathway for workers with job offers in TEER 4 and 5 occupations, which brings many sales, service, transport and labour roles into a provincial nomination route for the first time in a structured way; and
- a pathway for eligible self-employed physicians, who may qualify without a job offer if they meet Ontario’s licensing and billing requirements.
For the two TEER pathways, the job offer must be full-time and permanent, from an eligible Ontario employer. Minimum language and education requirements differ between the pathways, with the TEER 0 to 3 route setting the higher bar, and the program has signalled that experience with the offering employer counts in the candidate’s favour.
The employer goes first
The single most important change for candidates is that they can no longer start the process on their own. An Ontario employer must first register the employment position through the OINP Employer Portal. The program reviews the employer and the position: whether the business is genuine and established, whether it meets revenue and staffing requirements, and whether the job offer is real. Employers located in rural communities, defined as census divisions with fewer than 150,000 people, face lower revenue thresholds.
Only once the position has been approved can the worker register an Expression of Interest. If the employer or the position is not approved, the worker cannot be nominated regardless of their own qualifications. This is a deliberate response to the job offer fraud that troubled the previous streams, and it means employer engagement is now the gateway to the whole route.
Expression of Interest and scoring
Candidates with an approved position enter an Expression of Interest pool. The scoring framework published in July 2026 ranks candidates on factors that favour people already established in the province: Ontario work experience, Canadian income tax filing history, the wage offered, language ability, the location of the job (with additional weight for rural and northern communities), education and occupation.
Ontario then issues invitations to apply from the pool, and invited candidates have a fixed period to submit a full application. A nomination, if granted, supports a federal application for permanent residence.
Who this helps, and who it leaves out
The redesign is good news for people already working in Ontario for an employer willing to engage with the portal, particularly in health care, the trades and regional communities. It is difficult news for recent graduates without a job offer, since the graduate streams that allowed nomination on the strength of an Ontario degree alone are gone. For those candidates, federal routes such as Express Entry remain the primary option; we discuss them in our post on mapping a pathway from a PGWP to permanent residence.
Practical steps
- Talk to your employer early about registering the position. The employer step is the bottleneck.
- Confirm your occupation’s TEER category, since it determines the pathway and the requirements that apply.
- Complete an approved language test if you have not already; a valid result is needed to enter the pool.
- Keep your Ontario tax filings current. Filing history is now a scoring factor.
- Make sure your work permit remains valid throughout. A provincial nomination does not itself extend your status.
Because the program has described this as phase one of a broader redesign, further changes are expected, and details such as scoring weights and pathway requirements should be confirmed against the current OINP materials before relying on them.
Get the sequencing right
A provincial nomination is a two-party process now, and errors on the employer side can end a candidate’s application before it begins. If you or your employer are considering the Ontario Workforce Priority stream, book a consultation with Kabir & Alam Lawyers. Our permanent residence page describes the nomination and federal stages, and we can advise both employer and worker on the steps in the right order.