The Provincial Download

Everyone is talking about Canada cutting immigration.

Nobody is talking about Canada changing who runs it.

That's the actual story. And it's a bigger deal than the cuts.

How I See This

I need to tell you where I'm coming from. Because it shapes everything.

I moved to Canada from China when I was 18. Showed up at the University of Waterloo with a suitcase and no plan beyond getting a degree and figuring it out.

I went through the system. Not as an observer. As a body in the machine. I know what it feels like to have your life depend on a decision made by someone who's never met you, in an office you'll never visit, based on criteria that may or may not have anything to do with whether you'll actually succeed here.

That experience — being processed instead of selected — shaped how I see every immigration system I've encountered since. And I've encountered a lot.

I spent years running an immigration consulting practice. I've sat across from hundreds of founders navigating Canadian immigration. I've watched the system from inside, from outside, and from the cracks in between.

So when I tell you the federal model is broken, I'm not quoting a policy paper. I'm telling you what I saw.

The Start-Up Visa: A Case Study in Federal Failure

I want to tell you about the Start-Up Visa program. Because it's the perfect example of what goes wrong when Ottawa thinks it can select from the center.

The idea was good. Genuinely good. Canada would attract entrepreneur immigrants by connecting them with designated incubators and accelerators.

If an incubator believed in your startup, you got a pathway to permanent residency. Canada gets founders. Founders get Canada. Everybody wins.

Here's what actually happened.

Ottawa designed the program from a desk. They designated incubators across the country and said: you pick the startups, we'll process the visas. The theory was that incubators — being closer to the startup ecosystem — would select better than bureaucrats.

But Ottawa didn't build any real accountability into the system. The incubators got paid per applicant. There was no meaningful follow-up on whether the startups were real. No check on whether the founders actually built anything. No consequence for selecting garbage.

So the incentives did what incentives always do. They produced the outcome they were designed to produce.

Consultants figured out the game. Fake startups. Paper companies. Founders who had no intention of building a business in Canada — they just needed the commitment letter to get the visa.

Incubators that were supposed to be gatekeepers became rubber stamps. Some of them were barely operating businesses themselves.

I watched this happen in real time. I sat across from people who genuinely wanted to build something in Canada — real founders with real ideas — and they were stuck in the same pipeline as hundreds of fraudulent applications, waiting years for decisions because the system was clogged with people who'd bought their way in.

The program created a backlog of nearly 49,000 applicants. The government effectively killed it in December 2025. Years of work. Billions in processing costs. And the output was a system so compromised that shutting it down was the only honest option.

This is what happens when Ottawa says "we know how to select entrepreneurs."

They don't. They never did. And the wreckage of the Start-Up Visa is the proof.

The Architecture Problem

But the Start-Up Visa wasn't a unique failure. It was a symptom of a design flaw that runs through the entire federal immigration model.

The flaw is simple: the people making selection decisions don't live with the consequences of those decisions.

A bureaucrat in Gatineau approves an application based on a point score. That person lands in Toronto or Vancouver because that's where everyone goes. Toronto didn't ask for them. Vancouver didn't ask for them. Nobody matched them to a job, a community, or a need.

And then everyone acts surprised that Toronto can't build housing fast enough and Cape Breton can't fill nursing positions.

If you ran a company this way — hiring people at headquarters with no input from the teams that need them, then dropping them into random offices — you'd be fired in a quarter.

When Ottawa selected immigrants, the overcrowded ER in Brampton was someone else's problem. The rental bidding war in Surrey was someone else's problem. The school with 40 kids in a classroom was someone else's problem. Ottawa set the targets, took the photo op, and went home.

I watched this for years. And at some point I stopped being frustrated with the details and started being baffled by the design.

The decision-maker and the consequence-bearer were never in the same room. That's not a policy failure. That's a systems design failure. And you can't fix a design failure by tweaking the policy. You have to change the architecture.

That's what's happening now.

The Shift

The federal government is getting out of the immigration selection business.

Not officially. They'll never say it that way. But look at what's actually happening: every federal program is either shrinking, freezing, or getting so narrow it barely exists.

Meanwhile, the Provincial Nominee Program — the one channel where provinces pick who comes — just got the biggest allocation increase of any program in the levels plan.

That's not a coincidence. That's a blueprint.

Ottawa is keeping three things: the border, the security screen, and the citizenship stamp. Everything else — who comes, for what job, to which community — is being pushed to provinces.

When a premier selects immigrants, those outcomes are their outcomes. Doug Ford can't blame Ottawa if Ontario's picks don't integrate well.

David Eby can't point fingers if BC's selections don't match housing capacity. The decision and the consequence land on the same desk.

That changes incentives completely. Not perfectly — politicians are still politicians. But the feedback loop goes from years to months.

Quebec figured this out 40 years ago. The rest of Canada is about to catch up.

What This Looks Like If You Think Like a Founder

Here's where it gets interesting.

Provinces are about to compete for people.

Not in the vague, national branding way Canada has always competed for immigrants. In the direct, specific, "we need these exact people and here's what we're offering" way that cities compete for corporate headquarters.

And someone's going to figure it out first.

Imagine Alberta launches a 60-day healthcare worker pathway. Housing support on arrival. A $10K relocation grant.

Credential recognition that doesn't take three years. Nurses in the Philippines who would never have come through the federal lottery — who didn't even think of Canada — are now choosing Alberta specifically. Not Canada. Alberta.

Or imagine Nova Scotia builds a fast-track for skilled tradespeople with employer matching on day one. Or BC creates a founder stream that actually moves at startup speed instead of government speed — because they watched the Start-Up Visa die and thought, "we can do this better, for our market, with our accountability."

When one province cracks the code, the others copy or get left behind. That's competition. That's how you get better outcomes.

The federal monopoly produced a one-size-fits-all system that fit nobody. Provincial competition produces ten experiments. The best ones win.

I'm watching for which province moves first. That's where the opportunity is. For founders, for businesses, for anyone thinking about where in Canada actually wants them versus where will merely process their paperwork.

The Honest Risks

Let me be honest about what goes wrong. Because I've been in this space long enough to know the cheerleader version is dangerous.

Capacity.

Most provincial governments are not built for this. Quebec can do it because they've had 40 years of practice. Is PEI ready to run selection for thousands of immigrants a year? Does New Brunswick have the settlement infrastructure?

Some provinces are going to struggle badly. And when they do, the people they selected are the ones who suffer — landing in communities without the services, the housing, or the jobs to support them. Moving the decision to a different desk doesn't magically create infrastructure.

Fraud follows the money.

I watched it happen with the Start-Up Visa. I'll watch it happen again with PNP. The same consultants, the same fake job offers, the same paper companies don't disappear because you changed the letterhead. They find the new door. And provincial bureaucracies with less experience are probably more vulnerable than the federal system was. At least early on.

The first province that has a PNP fraud scandal will be a rough headline. It will come. It's just a question of when and where.

Boom-bust selection.

If provinces compete for immigrants, some will lower standards to hit economic targets in good years with no plan for downturns.

The oil patch has been through this with temporary foreign workers — need them desperately in the boom, can't support them in the bust. Provincial control doesn't eliminate boom-bust thinking. It might amplify it.

The blame game.

When things go wrong — and they will — Ottawa points at provinces: "you selected them." Provinces point at Ottawa: "you didn't fund the infrastructure." The people in the middle wait while two levels of government argue about whose budget line this falls under.

We've been doing this dance on healthcare for decades. Immigration is about to get the same treatment.

Why I Still Think It's Right

Here's where I land.

A system where the person making the decision has to live with the outcome is always better than a system where they don't.

That's the case for the provincial download in one sentence. Everything else is details.

I watched the federal model fail the Start-Up Visa. I watched it fail the communities that absorbed people Ottawa selected without asking.

I watched it fail the founders who did everything right and still got stuck behind 49,000 applications, half of them fake.

The failure wasn't the people. It wasn't the numbers. It was the architecture. The decision was disconnected from the consequence. And when that's the design, the design fails. Every time.

Provinces will make mistakes. Some of them will make big ones. But they'll feel those mistakes immediately — in their hospitals, in their schools, in their housing markets, in their next election.

Ottawa took twenty years to correct. Provinces won't have that luxury. Their voters won't give it to them.

What "Moving to Canada" Means Now

This is the part I think about most.

Under the old model, you were moving to Canada.

Under the new model, you're moving to Alberta. Or Nova Scotia. Or Ontario.

The country is the same but the proposition is completely different. The province that selects you is the province that's betting on you. That relationship is more real than anything the federal system ever offered.

When Ottawa approved your application, nobody in Ottawa cared whether you succeeded. You were a line item. When a province nominates you, that province has a stake in your outcome. You're part of their economic plan, their population strategy, their political accountability.

That's not a processing number. That's a bet.

I came to this country as a line item. An 18-year-old from China who showed up because the point score worked out. Nobody in Ottawa selected me because they thought George Pu would build something here. The system processed me. I happened to land in a place that worked.

Not everyone gets that lucky. And a system that depends on luck isn't a system. It's a lottery.

The provincial model is an attempt to replace the lottery with a bet. A province looking at a person and saying: we want you, specifically, for a reason. Come here. We're investing in this working.

That's better. Not perfect. But better.

The Pattern Underneath

I keep seeing the same thing everywhere I look.

Centralized systems built for a simpler era breaking under the weight of complexity. And the fix — every time — is pushing the decision closer to the consequence. Shorten the feedback loop. Let the people who live with the outcome make the call.

The Start-Up Visa failed because Ottawa tried to select entrepreneurs from the center. The provincial download succeeds — if it succeeds — because the person making the selection lives in the community that absorbs the outcome.

It's the same principle at every scale. The companies that push decision-making to the edges survive disruption. The countries that build their own infrastructure instead of depending on someone else's maintain sovereignty. The systems that shorten the distance between choice and consequence adapt. The ones that don't, break.

Canada's immigration architecture just crossed that threshold. The federal model couldn't keep up.

The provincial model might.

The transition will be messy. Some provinces will botch it. The fraud will follow the money. And millions of people caught in the old system will pay the price of a transition they didn't ask for.

But the principle underneath is sound.

The people who choose should be the people who live with the choice.