From Visitor Status to Work Permits: A Mississauga Family's Path

The situation

Nirosha and Kajan arrived in Canada on visitor visas with their young son, planning what they had told the border officer was a two-month family visit. Nirosha had spent nine years as a hotel front-desk supervisor back home, and Kajan had run his own small landscaping crew. Neither had planned to stay. But six weeks into the trip, two things happened that changed the plan.

A Mississauga hotel, short-staffed and impressed by Nirosha's experience in an interview she almost didn't attend, offered her a front-desk supervisor position. Around the same time, Kajan struck up a conversation with Diego, who ran a small landscaping company out of Mississauga, about a retaining wall Diego's crew was rebuilding near where the family was staying. Diego needed an experienced hand for the following season and offered Kajan a job on the spot.

Two genuine job offers, one family, and a visitor record that was going to expire in under ten weeks. Nirosha called our office after a friend mentioned that simply accepting a job while on a visitor visa is not how it works in Canada — a visitor cannot lawfully start working the day an offer is signed.

The problem

A visitor to Canada is authorized to visit, not to work. To work legally, a person generally needs a work permit, and for most non-exempt jobs, the employer first needs a positive Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) — a decision from the federal government confirming that hiring a foreign worker for that specific role will not have a negative effect on the Canadian labour market, usually after the employer has advertised the position and shown a genuine effort to recruit locally first.

That process takes time the family did not have much of. Two separate employers meant two separate LMIA applications, each with its own advertising requirements, wage obligations and processing queue. Meanwhile, the family's visitor status had a hard expiry date. If that date passed before new applications were filed and the family had taken steps to maintain status, they could lose what immigration officials call maintained status — the ability to remain in Canada lawfully while a new application is decided. Losing it would have meant leaving Canada and applying for work permits from abroad, adding months and separating Kajan from a job that was time-sensitive to Diego's season.

There was a second problem, discovered only once the applications were underway: Diego's job posting for the landscaping role had not run for the full length of time the LMIA process required, and the wage listed in it was below what similar roles in the area were paying. Both issues meant Service Canada was likely to reject the application as filed, not because Kajan wasn't a genuine, qualified candidate, but because the paperwork behind him didn't yet meet the standard.

What we did

1. Filed a visitor record extension immediately. Before anything else, we helped the family apply to extend their visitor status. This wasn't a work authorization — it simply kept their presence in Canada lawful while the work permit applications were prepared and decided, preserving maintained status so they would not be forced to leave partway through the process.
2. Separated the two employer streams and set realistic timelines. Nirosha's hotel employer was experienced with foreign hiring and had already begun advertising the front-desk role correctly before the offer was made. Kajan's application, tied to a first-time sponsor in Diego, needed more groundwork. We explained to both families that these would not move at the same speed, and that planning around the slower one mattered more than celebrating the faster one.
3. Flagged the advertising and wage gaps to Diego directly. We reviewed the job posting Diego had used and identified that it fell short of the minimum advertising period and that the offered hourly wage sat below the prevailing rate for landscaping work in the region. Rather than let the application go forward and fail, we raised both issues with Diego before submission.
4. Negotiated a revised offer. Diego was reluctant at first — the wage increase meant a real cost to a small operation, and re-advertising meant losing more weeks before Kajan could start. We worked with Kajan to lay out the alternative plainly: a lower-cost application that was likely to be refused, against a slightly more expensive one built to succeed. Diego agreed to raise the wage to match the prevailing rate and re-post the role for the required period, and Kajan agreed to accept a shorter first-year permit tied to the season rather than the two-year term he had hoped for, so the application could move forward on terms Service Canada would actually accept.
5. Advised Nirosha to apply as the principal applicant, with Kajan's application following once corrected. Rather than wait for both files to be perfect before submitting either, we filed Nirosha's completed, well-supported application right away and kept Kajan's moving on its own corrected timeline. This meant the family's income situation improved as soon as possible rather than being held hostage to the slower file.
6. Prepared the family for a request for additional information. Immigration officers reviewing work permit applications filed close to a visitor record's expiry sometimes ask applicants to explain the change in intention since arrival. We prepared Nirosha and Kajan to answer honestly and specifically — what changed, when, and why — rather than leaving gaps an officer might read as inconsistency.

The outcome

Nirosha's work permit was approved for the full term the hotel had offered, and she started at the front desk about four months after the family's original visitor status would have expired had it not been extended. That gave the household its first steady income since arriving.

Kajan's application took longer. Diego's corrected job posting and revised wage strengthened the file, but the officer reviewing it still limited the approved work permit to twelve months, shorter than the two-year term Kajan and Diego had originally hoped for, tied to the seasonal nature of landscaping work reflected in the underlying assessment. It was not the outcome either side wanted going in, but it was one both could work with: Kajan started that same season, and Diego kept an experienced worker he had already trained rather than starting over. Renewing the permit before it expires will mean going through a similar process again, something we flagged clearly so the family isn't caught by surprise a second time.

Across both applications, the family's out-of-pocket costs — work permit and biometric fees for each applicant, plus the LMIA processing fee Diego paid as the employer — added up to a real but manageable sum, drawn largely from savings the family had set aside before the trip for exactly this kind of settlement cost. It was not a cheap process, and it did not deliver everything they asked for. But it delivered lawful status, two paycheques, and a landscaping job Kajan could renew rather than restart.

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