Canada · Business and investment immigration
Money does not buy Canadian residence
The federal Start-Up Visa is closed to new applicants and the federal Self-Employed Persons Program is paused. What remains is provincial entrepreneur streams and work permits for people who own and run a business — and both require you to move to Canada and actually operate it. Confirm the current status of any route on the IRCC page before you pay anyone.
Say the difficult thing first
The Start-Up Visa is closed to new applicants
IRCC has closed the Start-Up Visa to new applications. Files already in the system continue to be processed, and time-limited transitional arrangements have applied to people who held a commitment certificate before the closure — the cut-off dates for those arrangements are published by IRCC and you should read them there rather than here. For a new applicant, there is no application to submit.
This matters because the Start-Up Visa was, for years, heavily marketed in Pakistan, and a good deal of that marketing has not stopped. If someone is currently offering to introduce you to a designated organisation, arrange a letter of support, or file a Start-Up Visa application on your behalf, they are describing a transaction that cannot happen. The correct response is to stop, not to ask the price.
IRCC has signalled that a replacement entrepreneur pilot is intended. We will not speculate about what it might require, when it might open, or whether it will open at all. If and when it does, the terms will be on the IRCC site before they are on ours.
The federal Self-Employed Persons Program is also not open
The federal route for self-employed people in cultural activities and athletics is not accepting new applications and remains paused while IRCC works through a backlog. It was never a general business-owner route in any case, though it has often been sold as one.
Both of these statuses are published by IRCC and both can change. Before you pay anyone anything for either route, open the government page yourself and read the notice at the top of it.
The landscape as it stands
What is closed, what is paused, what is open
Two of the four routes people ask us about are not currently accepting applications. Knowing which is which saves most of the money that gets lost here.
Federal · closed to new applicants
Start-Up Visa
Federal · paused
Self-Employed Persons
Provincial
Provincial entrepreneur streams
Temporary
Work permits for business owners
The central misunderstanding
Canada does not sell residence
Some countries operate schemes where a qualifying investment produces residence more or less directly. Canada, at the federal level, does not. There is no Canadian programme in which you transfer a sum of money, wait, and receive status.
What exists instead are provincial entrepreneur streams, and they are conditional almost all the way through. You commit capital, you relocate, you establish or buy a business, you manage it yourself, you employ Canadians, you meet the terms of a signed agreement — and only then is a nomination considered. The investment is a requirement, not the mechanism.
This is why the honest version of the conversation is often uncomfortable. Many people who arrive with capital and a good business record are not looking to emigrate and run a shop in a small Canadian city. If that is you, the business routes are probably not your routes, and it is better to hear that in the first hour than after the fees.
What provinces actually test
The recurring requirements
These appear, in some form, in almost every provincial entrepreneur stream. The levels differ; the categories are stable.
Verifiable personal net worth
Not just a balance today — a documented, lawful history of how the money was accumulated.
Traceable source of funds
Usually the heaviest part of the file. Gifts, informal lending and undocumented cash cause more refusals here than anywhere else.
Business ownership and control
A meaningful ownership share and genuine decision-making authority, not a passive stake.
Active day-to-day management
You, in the province, running the business. Remote ownership does not satisfy these streams.
Jobs for Canadians
Most streams expect the business to create or maintain employment for citizens and permanent residents.
Prior management experience
A track record of owning or senior-managing a business, evidenced rather than asserted.
Language ability
A tested level in English or French, because you are expected to run a business in the local market.
How a provincial entrepreneur file runs
The sequence, and where residence actually sits in it
Note where nomination falls. In most provinces you arrive first, operate the business, and are nominated afterwards — not before.
- 1
Establish what you actually want
Permanent residence, or the ability to run a business in Canada now? Those are different problems with different routes, and conflating them is where most money is wasted.
- 2
Pick the province before the programme
Business immigration is largely provincial. The sensible order is to decide where you would genuinely live and trade, then read that province’s stream — not to shop for the easiest-sounding criteria and reverse-engineer a location you have no intention of living in.
- 3
Test yourself against that stream in kind
Net worth, investment level, ownership share, sector restrictions, location within the province, language, management experience and whether the business must be new or may be a purchase. Every one of these varies by province and is published by that province.
- 4
Build a business plan that survives scrutiny
Not a template. A plan with a market you can evidence, costs that add up, and a role for you that a reviewer can believe. Where funds came from will be examined in detail — this is usually the heaviest documentary burden in the file.
- 5
Exploratory visit and the business performance agreement
Some provinces expect a visit, and several require you to sign an agreement committing to specific things: capital deployed, jobs created, your active involvement, and a timeframe. Whether either applies, and on what terms, is published by the province.
- 6
Operate the business, then seek nomination
Several entrepreneur streams are built this way: you arrive on a temporary work permit, run the business, meet the agreement, and only then are you considered for nomination. Where that is the design, residence is the end of the process, not the start — confirm the order on the provincial page.
Each province publishes its own criteria, and they diverge sharply — in sector rules, required location within the province, capital levels and whether you may buy an existing business. Individual streams also open, close, pause and are replaced, so treat the provincial government page as the only reliable statement of what exists today. Start from the provincial page for the place you would genuinely live: Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. Quebec runs its own system entirely, outside the federal-provincial nominee framework — see Quebec immigration. The PNP overview explains how nomination fits together with the federal side.
The temporary route
Work permits for people who own the business
If your aim is to be in Canada running a business now, rather than to obtain residence first, this is the route usually being described when someone says “owner-operator”. Be aware that “owner-operator” is not the name of a programme. There is no dedicated owner-operator immigration stream; there was once a distinct facilitated treatment for owner-operators within the labour market assessment process, and it was withdrawn. A business owner today applies through the ordinary work-permit framework — either with a labour market assessment, or under one of the exemptions, most commonly the one for work that brings a significant benefit to Canada. Which applies depends on the facts, and the categories and their conditions are published by IRCC.
Two things about it are consistently misrepresented. First, it is a temporary permit. It is not permanent residence and it does not become permanent residence by the passage of time. What it can do is establish you in Canada with a real, trading, documented business — which may later support a provincial or federal application on its own merits.
Second, the business has to be real. Officers assess whether the enterprise is genuine and viable, whether you actually control and run it, and what benefit it brings to Canada. Buying a dormant company to generate paperwork is a well-recognised pattern, it is expensive, and it risks a misrepresentation finding.
The work-permit mechanics — including which permits require a Labour Market Impact Assessment and which do not — are set out on our Canadian work permit page, with the two mechanisms explained at LMIA-based permits and LMIA-exempt permits. If you already run a business abroad and want to open or staff a Canadian arm of it, an intra-company transfer is often the more accurate description of what you are trying to do.
What commonly goes wrong
The failure patterns we see from Pakistan
Paying for a closed programme. The Start-Up Visa is still being sold. So, in places, is the Self-Employed Persons Program. Check the government page for the notice at the top before any money moves.
Source of funds that cannot be traced. The single most common reason business files fail. Property sold informally, business income kept outside the banking system, large family transfers with no paper behind them. The money may be entirely legitimate and still be undocumentable, and undocumentable is treated as unproven.
A business plan bought off a shelf. Reviewers see the same templates repeatedly. A plan describing a market you have not researched, with costs that do not reconcile, signals that you do not intend to run the business.
No intention to actually move. Streams are provincial and residence in that province is the point. Selecting a province purely because its criteria look lighter, while planning to live somewhere else, is visible in the file and undermines it.
Treating the work permit as residence. People accept an owner-operator structure believing permanent residence follows automatically. It does not. Understand what you are buying before you commit capital to it.
Nominee and silent-partner structures. Arrangements where you hold a share on paper while someone else runs the business are the exact thing these streams exclude. Presenting one as genuine ownership is misrepresentation, which carries a bar on future applications — see what a misrepresentation finding means.
Being honest about fit
Who this route does not suit
If you are not going to move and run the business, this is not your route
Business immigration does not suit passive investors, people who want status while keeping their life and enterprise in Pakistan, or anyone whose plan depends on someone else operating the Canadian business. Every open route here is built on personal, active management in a specific province.
It also tends not to suit people whose wealth is real but cannot be documented to a government standard, people whose management experience is family-business seniority without records behind it, and people who are unwilling to spend an initial period in Canada on a temporary permit before any nomination is considered.
And it is very often the wrong question. Many of the people who come to us asking about investment routes turn out to be better served by a skilled route: Express Entry if their profession and education fit, or a provincial nominee stream if a specific province needs what they do. Those routes are usually far less demanding of capital, though they carry no more certainty of an outcome than any other. You can test the skilled side yourself with our CRS calculator.
We would rather tell you on the first call that this does not fit than take a fee for a file that was never going to work. Nomination and permit decisions belong to governments, not to us, which is why we publish a no-guarantee policy and an open fee schedule.
Where the current details live
Programme status, thresholds and fees
Programme status changes — that is the whole lesson of this area. Investment minimums, net-worth thresholds, deposit requirements, sector rules, processing times, cut-off dates and government fees are set by each province and by IRCC and are revised. We deliberately publish none of those figures here, because a figure that is correct on the day it is written becomes a liability on a page you read a year later.
IRCC publishes the current federal position, including its notice on immigration measures for entrepreneurs and the status notices for the Start-Up Visa and the Self-Employed Persons Program. Which work-permit categories exist for business owners, and the conditions attached to each, are set out in the IRCC program delivery instructions for foreign workers. Each provincial entrepreneur stream — including whether it currently exists and is open — is published by that province’s own immigration authority, and the underlying legal framework sits in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations. Read the figures at the source, on the day you need them.
Straight answers
The questions people actually ask
Can I still apply for Canada’s Start-Up Visa?
What about the Self-Employed Persons Program?
How much do I need to invest to get Canadian permanent residence?
Can I invest passively and let someone else run the business?
Is an “owner-operator” work permit a route to permanent residence?
Which province is easiest for entrepreneurs?
How much are the fees and the minimum investment?
Can you guarantee a nomination or a permit?
Before you commit capital
Find out whether a business route is even the right question
Tell us what you own, what you have run, whether your funds can be documented, and whether you would genuinely relocate. We will tell you honestly whether this fits — and if it does not, which route might.