Wish there was more transparency ... it’s lots of waiting and uncertainty. The federal immigration minister should make a speech this week some time, which sets out numbers. I’d figured they were waiting for this to be official but then people have been getting nominations in 2020, which to be fair is what AINP says on their website.
The number of nominations the AINP can issue for 2020 is not yet available; however the AINP will continue to assess applications in the queue and issue nominations in 2020.
They’ve also been trying to bring in a Municipal Nomination system with at least 5000 places nationally, but nothing has been announced yet around how this will work or if it will use up some
PNP spots (
https://pm.gc.ca/en/mandate-letters/2019/12/13/minister-immigration-refugees-and-citizenship-mandate-letter).
Some people get their employer contacted and some do not. It presumably comes down to whether the officer has questions about the application they want to verify or they’re doing a random check. Applicants are supposed to provide full contact details. Though it probably wouldn’t occur to a Canadian that some bosses would be unscrupulous and ask for money to respond. Your average North American is not necessarily aware how to ring a foreign country, but I’m sure an immigration officer would know how to contact. They’d probably not reject an application outright if they could not contact, but they might ask the applicant for additional information.
