When Abeer got an email confirming her position in a wireless communication research lab at Carleton University, she said she was blown away.
“After all I’ve been through, being displaced and living with so much uncertainty, this opportunity felt like a door finally opening again,” Abeer said.
At that point, she had been living as a Sudanese refugee in Somalia for a little more than a year. The Charlatan is witholding Abeer’s last name from this story because of safety concerns in her home country.
It has now been more than eight months since her application was submitted to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, with no sign of progress.
With a PhD in wireless communications and networking engineering from Universiti Putra Malaysia, Carleton computer science professor Thomas Kunz said Abeer’s experience in machine learning would be helpful when training “blue agent defenders,” which form a defense system against sophisticated cyberattacks like phishing and malware.
“Abeer is a person who has the relevant skills, who would be an enrichment to the team,” Kunz said.
But program coordinators and Canadian recruiters have expressed concern over the impermanency of the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot (EMPP) program, which Carleton is using to bring Abeer to Ottawa.
The program, which connects Canadian employers with refugee scholars, is facing increasing criticism as its expiry deadline looms.
Abeer’s case with Kunz’s Carleton research lab is the university’s first attempt at bringing international talent to Canada.
Between its launch in 2018 and November 2024, the program successfully brought in approximately 595 applicants to Canada. The federal government extended the EMPP program by six months in June — when it was set to expire. The pilot program will now expire by Dec. 31, 2025. This means employers are facing a dwindling timeline to identify international employees and complete their paperwork.
Kunz said he initiated Abeer’s recruitment process soon after getting a three-year funding grant for his project.
“I thought it was good timing,” he said. “But now we’re starting year two, and it’s a three-year program.”
Carleton’s 12-year-old Scholars at Risk program has recruited 20 scholars to date, according to Norah Vollmer, who oversees international recruitment at Carleton and sits on the program’s committee. Scholars at Risk Carleton is part of an international network of institutions that promote academic freedom by arranging one-to-two-year research and teaching positions in host departments.
Program facilitators at Carleton and in Ottawa say the IRCC’s average processing time alone outlasts the program’s six-month extension, creating uncertainty for potential employers and applicants.
Dana Wagner, co-founder and managing director at Talent Lift, a non-profit international recruitment agency, who is overseeing Abeer’s paperwork with the IRCC, said Abeer’s application was completed and submitted to the IRCC in October 2024.
‘Just an unwise way to do business’
The delay in processing time hurts employers seeking to recruit international talent, Wagner said. With the EMPP program now extended by just six months, Wagner said she worries employers would be less inclined to start the application process.
“Put yourself in an employer’s shoes: trying to plan ahead to have somebody in a role in six months, but then that processing time gets up to 11 months,” Wagner said. “How do you plan your hiring around such an uncertain timeline?”
Heavy reliance on employers to participate has exasperated that uncertainty, Wagner added.
“You’re relying on that trust,” Wagner said, adding that disruptions in processing time are “just an unwise way of doing business.”
On average, 80 per cent of EMPP applications are processed in 11 months — a five-month increase to the service standard of six months, according to an IRCC spokesperson.
In an emailed statement, the IRCC acknowledged that despite a decrease in application numbers, processing times for some applications have increased.
But the impact is not limited to employers.
For Abeer, who has been in Somalia for more than a year and hoping every day to begin her research at Carleton, the waiting period has been mentally taxing.
“The prolonged delay has been emotionally and professionally draining,” Abeer said.
But for Ukrainian Olha Chernovol, that sense of uncertainty did not disappear even years after working in Canada.
Chernovol, a postdoctoral fellow studying law at the University of Ottawa, arrived in Ottawa in June 2022 through the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel, a special program created when the war between Ukraine and Russia first broke out three years ago.
The Ukrainian scholar and lawyer has been working in anti-corruption at the university on an open work permit over the last three years. Now that her contract with the school is about to expire, she said the feelings of uncertainty are creeping up again.
“It takes time to navigate in the system to make myself recognized here,” she said, adding that there is an unspoken pressure for refugee scholars to stand out to employers before their contracts run out.
EMPP more flexible than others but lacks permanency
Despite concerns over processing delays, Wagner said the program was theoretically the perfect pathway for Abeer, since applying for a work permit was unlikely to succeed.
What is unique about the EMPP program, Wagner said, is that it allows successful applicants to gain permanent residency upon arrival in Canada to permanently work and live in Canada without needing to prove that they will return to their home country.
“We need a program that’s actually specifically designed to account for those circumstances and to accommodate them,” Wagner said.
Vollmer said Carleton normally recruits scholars through Scholars at Risk’s visiting professor pathway. But she said that pathway is similarly flawed because it assumes scholars would have the opportunity to return home at the end of their stay.
“In some cases, some of our scholars were able to return home … but it’s becoming more and more apparent that these conflicts are not over by the end of their two or three year stay at Carleton,” Vollmer said.
In December 2023, former immigration minister Marc Miller pledged to make the EMPP program permanent. But as of September, regulations amending the Immigration and Refugee Regulations to make the EMPP program a permanent one have not been finalized.
In October 2024, international recruitment was hit with another setback as the government announced its intentions to slash immigration levels.
In 2025, the number of permanent resident arrivals so far would see a 21 per cent drop to approximately 395,000 arrivals, down from approximately 500,000 at the same time the previous year.
Under the IRCC’s 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan, the department reduced the number of both permanent and temporary resident targets for 2026 and 2027 by 1,000 compared to 2025 under the economic branch, which includes the EMPP program.
“Our government can tell us one thing, and then in practice, we see it much longer,” Wagner said. “That shouldn’t be acceptable.”
Beyond Carleton, other Ottawa-based organizations are calling for the federal pilot program’s permanency and flexibility in requirements for already-recruited scholars.
Pia Zambelli, chair of the refugee committee at the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association, said in a statement that despite being pleased to see the June extension for the program, experts want the federal government to honour its promise to make the program permanent.
Zambelli said this would “both assist genuine United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-approved refugees and address Canada’s labour market needs.”
In June, the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association called on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government “to honour the unfulfilled promises of the Trudeau government Canada’s commitment to refugee protection and economic inclusion by making the EMPP a permanent program.”
The organization said the EMPP program can do more to make it accessible and to accommodate the realities of refugees – which includes easing some assessment requirements due to official documents being left behind or destroyed.
“These assessments can be difficult to obtain for refugees in camps or other precarious living situations — particularly where official documents are impossible to access due to a flight from persecution,” Zambelli wrote.
‘More than just a research position’
The wait for Abeer’s paperwork is delaying progress in Kunz’s project, Vollmer said.
“We’re sitting here with a researcher who has funding. He’s in year-two of a three-year project, he wants this researcher here,” Vollmer said.
“This person has skills that they contribute to Canada, yet we’re waiting on this immigration paperwork.”
Kunz said the funding for the project would be cut in the summer of 2027 after completing its three-year funding period.
He said the delays he and his team have experienced have not necessarily increased his workload, but he feels frustrated.
“At the end of the day, I’m not where I want to be,” Kunz said.
For Abeer, her position in Kunz’s research lab is “more than just a research position.”
“It’s a signal that I’m not forgotten.”
Featured graphic by Alisha Velji/the Charlatan
