Visa sponsors in Ontario

ESDC publishes approved headcount on positive Labour Market Impact Assessments, not visas issued. A position can be approved and never filled, so this measures permission to hire abroad rather than arrivals.

LMIA volume is dominated by seasonal agriculture, so this shows who sponsors, not demand for any particular profession.

An employer operating in more than one province appears under each of them, so province figures do not add up to the national total. Every number on this page is read straight from IRCC / ESDC positive LMIA employer list, and none of it is an estimate.

These are the employers with the most approved LMIA positions recorded against a Ontario address, named exactly as the register spells them. Between them they account for 15.1% of everything the register attributes to Ontario, which is how concentrated sponsorship here really is.

Every positive assessment names the work it was granted for. Counting employers rather than positions keeps this exact: a single approval total covers all of an employer's occupations at once, and splitting it between them would invent a number ESDC never published.

9 provinces and territories clear the 25-employer floor we report on individually, and sponsorship is nowhere near evenly spread between them. Quebec carries 1.1 times as many sponsoring employers as Ontario, so where you look changes the odds before your CV does.

A place on the register means an employer has sponsored before, which is the single hardest thing to verify from a job advert. It does not mean they are hiring today, so treat the list as a shortlist to research rather than a set of open roles.

Our job board for Canada only carries listings from employers on this register. The full Canada breakdown ranks every region, and our analysis of all three registers sets out how the UK, US and Canadian sources differ and why their numbers should never be added together.