HomeTagPNP Archives - Immigration Lawyer Vancouver, Canada | Sas & Ing Immigration Law Centre

As the first lawyer in a family of doctors - specifically family physicians - I have always been perplexed at the failure of our federal, provincial and territorial governments to come together to offer a solution to allow foreign trained doctors to integrate into the Canadian health care system as immigrants and ultimately as practitioners in their field. When I first started practice, (over 35 years ago) the rationale was that our provincial governments spent a lot of money educating our Canadian medical students and that any places at the employment table should be reserved for our own medical graduates and not others. It took less than a decade from starting my practice for federal, provincial and territorial governments, as well as the corresponding regulatory bodies, to realize that this restrictive approach was actually limiting the supply of doctors that Canada needed overall. It is no secret that the wheels of government turn slowly and finally on December 8, 2025, our federal government introduced an immigration program to be delivered in conjunction with the provinces and territories through the Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs) to facilitate permanent residence for doctors already working in Canada. Let’s examine how this new program is supposed to work.