A permanent residence visa is something that is issued by the Canadian government to a citizen of some other country who has landed in Canada but is not a Canadian citizen. A permanent residence visa gives exactly the same rights to its holder which are given to a Canadian citizen except for Voting and doing a job in Defence.

Different streams for applying for the Permanent Residency – 

A) Express Entry Federal Skilled Worker- It is a Comprehensive Ranking Score based process. Here the applicants can file for the pr visa Express Entry Pool where their application in rewarded with points based on age, education, language, blood relatives in Canada, and work experience. There comes a cutoff on fixed intervals and the applicants with the same or higher score than the cutoff are invited to apply for permanent residency. The PR visa given here is valid for the entirety of Canada for the complete 5 years of duration.

B) Provincial Nomination Under Express Entry- Here the Comprehensive Ranking Score of an applicant does not matter much. Here the applicants are nominated on the basis of occupations required in any particular province and the occupations of the applicants in the Express Entry Pool. The provinces also nominate applicants with any past education or work experience or any blood relative in that province. The PR visa given here is valid for only the province which has nominated the applicant for the first 2 years out of the 5 years of duration of the PR visa. After 2 years applicants are free to move to other provinces for settlement.

C) Provincial Nomination through in Demand occupation list- These are basically the individual provincial nomination programs. Each and every province operates a separate PR program to fulfill the shortcoming of employees for the employers of that province. Here there is a list of occupations and only those with certain other criteria can apply for permanent residency.