Immigration of Catholic Priests in Canada

April 6, 2021

Question
I’m currently working on a research piece about the immigration of catholic priests in Canada due to a decline in local priests and growing secularization in the country.

I am looking for the statistics and numbers on the immigration of religious workers in Canada since the 1990s, and more specifically Catholic priests. I would like to find the following information:

·         Number of priests that immigrated to Canada as "religious workers" each year since 1990

·         Where these priests were from

·         Which province these priests migrated to or at least which parish sent a letter to hire them

If the type of religious worker (ex: priest/rabbi/imam) is not tracked, and only the number of religious workers as a whole is tracked, I would still like the stats on the number of religious workers that immigrated to Canada from 1990 and what province they went to.

Answer

I found from IRCC a bit of the legal aspect about this:

Religious work – International Mobility Program https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/publications-manuals/operational-bulletins-manuals/temporary-residents/foreign-workers/work-without-permit/authorization-work-without-work-permit-clergy.html

 

There are two separate provisions in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (IRPR) relating to religious work:

 

• paragraph R186(l) provides a work permit exemption for religious leaders
• paragraph R205(d) provides a labour market impact assessment (LMIA) exemption (code C50)

 

So I looked on the Open Data Portal for data on the International Mobility Program and found the following

 

Temporary Residents: Work Permit Holders – Ad Hoc IRCC (Specialized Datasets)

Temporary residents who are in Canada on a work permit in the observed calendar year. Datasets include Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and International Mobility Program (IMP) work permit holders by year in which permit(s) became effective. Please note that the datasets will not be updated.

https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/67fd1fae-4950-4018-a491-62e60cbd6974

 

Specialized Research Datasets: Temporary Resident – Ad Hoc IRCC (Specialized Datasets)

https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/31ef4cab-d2b3-4dba-8e91-48fe64211ec5

 

But I can’t validate that the data contains the specific work permit of interest because when I click on the Access button, nothing happens on either dataset. Perhaps IRCC would have the data and could make it available upon request?