Canada's Provincial Nominee Program, or PNP, is the route that lets provinces and territories pick candidates who match their local labour needs. Every province and territory except Quebec and Nunavut runs at least one PNP stream. If Express Entry is Canada's front door for skilled workers, the PNP is a set of side doors that often open at a lower score.

How a provincial nomination works

You apply to a province under one of its streams, usually based on a job offer, your work experience, or a connection to the region. If the province agrees that you fit, it issues a nomination. The nomination is not permanent residence by itself. You then submit a full PR application to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) for the federal security, medical, and admissibility checks.

Base and enhanced streams

Every PNP stream is either base or enhanced, and the difference matters.

A base stream runs outside Express Entry. You apply through the province's own portal, wait for the nomination, and then submit a paper PR application to IRCC. Base applications are generally slower on the federal side than enhanced ones; IRCC publishes its current estimate for each application type in its processing times tool, which is the only figure worth planning around.

An enhanced stream is tied to Express Entry. You must already have an Express Entry profile, and a nomination adds 600 points to your CRS score, half of the maximum anyone can hold (IRCC: CRS criteria). Nobody can promise you an invitation, because cutoffs move from draw to draw, but 600 points is more than every other additional factor combined; IRCC publishes each draw's cutoff on its rounds of invitations page.

Active and passive nominations

A separate question is who starts the conversation. In active streams you apply directly to the province, often into an Expression of Interest pool it runs itself. In passive streams the province fishes candidates out of the federal Express Entry pool, usually by sending a Notification of Interest to profiles that match a target occupation or language need. Active and passive is orthogonal to base and enhanced: a stream can be any combination.

The provinces and their programs

Each province and territory runs its own set of streams, with its own occupation lists, cutoffs, and draw cadence. The list below links to each program's official page.

Quebec and Nunavut

Quebec is not part of the PNP. It runs its own immigration system, with skilled-worker candidates submitting an Expression of Interest through Arrima and, if selected, applying for a Quebec Selection Certificate (CSQ) before going on to the federal PR stage. The official starting point is Québec's immigration portal. Nunavut has no nominee program at all; there is no PNP stream that targets the territory directly.

Where to go from here

Our post on Express Entry explains how the enhanced path connects to the federal programs, and the CRS score post covers how those 600 nomination points plug into the total. For the official source, read IRCC's PNP overview.

What this means for your report

Our report does not treat the PNP as one thing, because it is not one. Each province's and territory's streams are assessed as separate pathways with their own rules, alongside a Provincial Nominee Program via Express Entry pathway for the enhanced route. Every provincial pathway carries a fixed "willing to settle in this province" requirement, read from the single questionnaire answer where you say which provinces and territories you would move to, or that you have no preference; a province you rule out is shown as ruled out rather than scored as if you would move there. The rest of each stream is checked against the same answers as everything else: your occupation's TEER category, your language scores, your education, and where in Canada you have worked or studied. That is the case for answering once instead of opening a dozen provincial sites: one set of answers, every stream compared against it.

The nomination itself is a step, never a verdict. Routes that need one carry "Obtain a provincial nomination" as a required checklist item, the enhanced route carries "Create an Express Entry profile" beside it, and the Saskatchewan streams that run their own Expression of Interest pool carry "Receive a provincial nominee invitation", each linking the official page behind it. A stream a province has closed is not assessed, not shown and not counted, so the report does not send you after a door that is already shut.

What it does not do: it does not apply on your behalf, it does not know a province's next draw or its cutoff, and it never tells you that you qualify.

Where to start

Ready to see where you stand before chasing a nomination? The free CRS calculator lets you tick a provincial nomination on and off, so you can see your score with and without those 600 points, and the free Express Entry eligibility checker shows the federal selection-factor score that sits behind the Express Entry programs. To have the provincial streams and the federal routes checked against one set of answers, answer the free questionnaire: the questions are free, the eligibility summary at the end is free, and payment unlocks the full report with the checklist behind each route.