Creation of a Pool of Skilled Workers
In recent years, New Zealand and Australia – countries with immigration systems similar to ours – have made their systems nimbler, more flexible and more responsive to modern labour-market realities.
Like us, New Zealand legislated an end to its backlog in 2003 and put in place a system where prospective applicants can be selected from a pool made up of prospective immigrants with the skills, experience and education that are most needed in that country. Australia is introducing a similar system this year.
Rather than having to process all applications, regardless of whether an applicant’s skills match current labour market needs, their resources can now be put towards actively matching the best recently qualified applicants to current economic needs and even to specific companies, who can use the pool of applicants as a pool of prospective recruits.
We want to explore with provinces, territories and employers approaches to developing a similar pool of skilled workers who are ready to begin employment in Canada.
The goal is a simplified and expedited immigration process that selects the applicants with the best and most in-demand qualifications and, at the same time, eliminates the scourge of backlogs, which, as we have seen, can bring an immigration system nearly to a standstill.
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/speeches/2012/2012-06-28.asp
I am not sure which pool he is talking about. Will this be applicable to applications already in queue?
