New pilot program launched to help attract, retain immigrant workers to Vernon

Jun 10, 2025 | 4:35 PM

A new pilot is being launched to build off a previous program that helped bring more workers to Vernon.

In the wake of the Rural Northern Immigration Pilot (RNIP) coming to an end last summer, Community Futures North Okanagan will launch a new pilot to help temporary workers get permanent resident status.

“[The Rural Community Immigration Pilot] is an economic development project that is intended to allow skilled workers to obtain permanent residency. It is, first and foremost, a skilled permanent resident program,” Leigha Horsfield, Executive Director with Community Futures North Okanagan (CFNO) told Vernon City Council at the regular meeting Monday, June 9.

“The intention is for the government to test if you put the decision making capability in the hands of community, will you have more success in retaining skilled immigrants in your community. What we proved during RNIP is that we had an 87 per cent retention rate out of the over 1,000 newcomers.”

The Rural Community Immigration Pilot (RCIP) will operate in the North Okanagan and parts of the Shuswap, and will have several criteria attached.

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“It has to be a full time, non-seasonal job; the minimum wage will have to be $22 per hour or more; they’ll have to work for a designated employer, these are employers that have applied to this program and that we designate; they have to have one year’s work experience in the field that they are applying to be in, so if they want to be a care aide they have to have worked for a minimum of a year as a care aide; they have to have the required language requirements or higher; and they must intend to reside in the community,” Horsfield explained.

“This is the secret sauce: keeping them in our community. I think what we learned in our last pilot was that we can do that successfully based on the criteria that we set for this program, because we know that people come here and have children, they don’t want to uproot those children; if they have roots in this community, if they work for a great employer, they decide to stay.”

The CFNO executive director went on to say that most immigrants who come to Canada want to go to a big city centre, but the North Okanagan needs to draw people in to help boost the local workforce.

The RCIP program had designated several industries as key priorities for the workers. Those include health care, education, law and social work, community and government services, sales and services, trades and transportation, and manufacturing. Non-priority, but still designated industries also included in the program, will be early childhood education, community service workers, construction helper, carpenter, and restaurant managers, with Horsfield noting these can be changed in the future to meet labour market demands in the community.

As of Monday, June 2, Horsfield said 120 employers had already been approved to be part of the program, with another 134 who had expressed interest but not fully applied.

The application window for the RCIP program opened Monday, June 9, and Horsfield said she expected CFNO to recommend 335 people for 2025, noting most of them were already in the community and working in the designated industries.

All North Okanagan municipalities, as well as CFNO, had signed on as funding partners in this pilot.

The local RCIP program is one of 14 being run across Canada, with the only other two communities in B.C. running it being the West Kootenays and Northern B.C. -Fort St. John.

The presentation to Vernon City Council was accepted as information, and Mayor Victor Cumming told Vernon Matters the immigration programs had been very succesful in the past, and should continue to do so in the future.

“This is a system that is working well, working well for employers, working well for the communities, and most people who come through this system, more than 85 per cent, stay on for the longer term,” the mayor said.

“It’s just really important that we have enough youth to fill these positions when us baby boomers start moving out of the workforce, and that requires us to hire well internally, and also to add some immigration.”

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by Liam Verster

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