I understand Australia is also quite challenging and I'm aware immigrating to a new country is not easy. But hopes on moving to Canada pretty much looks gloomy for me at the moment. I'm tired of appearing for IELTS over and over again. So much waste of money and time. After 1 year, I finally got the desired score but its still not enough. It is heartbreaking when you see people with CLB 7 manage to get ITAs from provinces while people like me with clb 9 and clb 10 are still stuck in this 'hope' queue for months waiting for a miracle We are not getting any younger either by all this waiting and there seems to be no guarantee that we will ever get an ITAI don't want to sound south in a forum that has "hope" in its title, but "mate", from experience, Australia is equally challenging. At least Canada issue more than 7K ITAs every month. Australia only issue about 2000 ITAs per month. They used to run two invitation rounds per month, on Wednesdays, just like Canada, but now they only run a single invitation round on 11th of every month. This has the effect of shadowing people with low score.
Additionally, the equivalent of provincial nomination is called "State sponsorship" here, and that too is not as smooth a ride as PNPs. (Not saying that PNPs are easier, but they surely stand better in comparison).
The positive for Australia is that they accept an English test called PTE -- which is far easier to ace (and faster, and fairer) than IELTS. Also, you can get points for doing a translation course, which is much shorter in duration than a full-blown degree. A third plus is that you can also get points for doing another 1-year course called "professional year".
Again, not saying Australia isn't an option, just putting things in perspective. So choose your bets with care.
I may or may not make it Australia but atleast I will get a little satisfaction that I have put forth all my best efforts and didn't waste all my precious time and money by laying all eggs in one basket
Apologies for throwing a lot of negativity in a ray of 'hope' thread. For some of us there seems to be no hope in sight