It cannot be emphasized enough that even if a job is definitively for a Canadian business, it can be extremely tricky to know whether a credit will be given toward compliance with the PR Residency Obligation for any long-term employment abroad.
Thus, it warrants emphasizing that before taking a long-term job at a location abroad, or at the very least before relying on getting PR RO credit for any time employed abroad, obtaining the opinion of a qualified, reputable, Canadian immigration lawyer is the prudent thing to do.
Determining if and when a PR Residency Obligation credit is available while employed abroad by a Canadian business, for any employment beyond the obvious, clear-cut short term assignment (which usually means the PR will not need the credit to begin with), demands a careful, informed, experienced analysis of a wide range of facts and circumstances. This forum is NOT an appropriate venue for obtaining legal analysis or a legal opinion.
Yes, this raises an obvious question: "what then is the credit for?" It is a good question. There is no clear answer. But make no mistake, as we have seen this credit applied (or more often, not applied despite being employed by a Canadian business), it is difficult to see who will qualify for this credit other than PRs who most likely do not need the credit.
As for the job being a "temporary assignment," it is worth remembering that saying it is so does not necessarily make it so, and more than a few cases have had a negative outcome due to CIC/IRCC concerns about the employer's credibility as much as the PR's. That is, CIC/IRCC have challenged, contested, or outright discounted the purported terms of the contract and looked more at the actual job itself.
So, before PRs begin running to their employers and getting terms incorporated into the contract of employment which ostensibly meet the temporary assignment requirement, and relying on incorporating such terms into the contract, getting a qualified, independent lawyer's opinion is still the better approach.
If I have time, I will later post some citations of authority regarding this. For now, the tipping point in this came around 2011, with the Jiang decision being one of the more salient and subsequently cited decisions about this.
See Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v. Jiang, 2011 FC 349 at http://canlii.ca/t/flfrk
Note, this decision has been cited scores and scores of times, most often relative to the proposition that ". . .the panel’s finding that permanent residents holding full-time positions outside Canada with an eligible Canadian company can accumulate days that would enable them to comply with the residency obligation set out in section 28 of the Act, is unreasonable." This follows and largely applies the Minister's argument that there is "a distinction between an overseas assignment and being employed, on a permanent basis, in a position outside Canada."
To be clear about what Justive Boivin's decision states, and is thus a statement of law: there is NO credit for time working abroad for a Canadian business if the employment abroad is a permanent position.
There are links to more than a hundred citations of the Jiang decision, many of which are precisely about applying a temporary requirement, so anyone interested in doing their own research can start with the Jiang decision and follow the links from there.
Nonetheless, even if one does a lot of their own homework, it would be foolish to not obtain a professional opinion before relying on getting credit for any long-term job abroad.
It is worth noting the profound distinction and different direction things took regarding the other credit, that being relative to giving credit to a PR accompanying a Canadian citizen spouse. This went in the opposite direction. See for example the Liong v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2013 CanLII 98789 (CA IRB) decision at http://canlii.ca/t/gj8wt . . . which illustrates the concern many might have about the credit but illustrates that the CIC, now IRCC, approach this issue, this credit, far more liberally and generously than they do the employed abroad credit.
