If I recall, the original premise of EE was proving an immigrant could fill a job position, to do that they considered employability and adaptation capacity based on education, language, age and work experience. With the current job market and pandemic I think it makes a lot of sense they want to attract people with certain occupations that experiencing a shortage of workers now, but that'd make EE very unpredictable.I think the government knows a lot of people are going to end up being retrained and reallocated to different occupations when they come to Canada.
That's the difference between Canada's and Australia's system, Canada want skilled people but it's not necessarily that they will work in their field, they expect new immigrants to adapt to professions and roles which are in demand. They're more interested in getting young people with strong language skills, who are educated but who can also shift to other professions if needs be. Basically they have transferrable skills and are retrainable. With Australia, they look at the job market and see where there are shortages and allocate ceilings based on the numbers they need to fill in different occupations. They're not bothered with losing well educated people with Australian qualifications or work experience if they're not employed in an occupation with a labour shortage. But that's also because Australia's demographics are more favourable, and because immigration is increasingly unpopular there because of the congestion in their major cities.
Covid has exposed EE's flaws, why bring doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc if they won't be able to work on their field due to the difficulty of getting a valid license in Canada? Or are looked down upon because of their lack of Canadian Experience? We all know the infamous "Uber driver with a PhD" story, or ultra skilled professionals that end up working in professions well below their educational level.
Those major reforms might implement a NOI system in the whole pool, not just for PNP eligible people, and everyone with an in-demand occupation might get a significant point boost without going through the entire PNP process. Just speculating, but the gap between regular immigrants and "in-demand" immigrants will become very notorious.
I feel like the new streams, the "90k" is both a pilot to test the profiles of in-demand workers (age, professional profile) and the last chance for many non-essential graduates to get PR before a major reform that won't favour highly educated people as much as highly employable people.