Our questionnaire and our report cover the routes people plan for: skilled and points-based routes, family sponsorship, study, work, and business or investor routes. The routes on this page sit outside that on purpose. They turn on circumstances a questionnaire cannot fairly weigh, such as danger, harm, a court process, or a government measure that opens and closes with an event. That is not a judgement about how much they matter. It means an automated assessment is the wrong instrument, and that someone who needs one of these routes needs a person, not a score.

Each of them has a free guide, written in plain words and linked below.

Refugee protection and humanitarian routes

These are the routes for someone who cannot safely go home. In both countries a person already inside the country, or at its border, can ask for protection, and both countries also resettle a small number of people from abroad through their own programmes. Nobody scores points and nobody needs a job offer. Read Canada's refugee and humanitarian routes and New Zealand's refugee and asylum routes.

Protection where there is family violence

Some people hold their immigration status through somebody else: a partner who sponsored them, or an employer named on their work permit. When that person becomes abusive or exploitative, both countries have measures that let someone leave and still stay in the country lawfully. Whether they apply turns on facts about a person's safety that we do not ask about and would not hold. Read Canada's options where there is family violence and New Zealand's family violence and exploitation visas. If you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number first.

Adoption

Bringing an adopted child to Canada is two processes rather than one: the adoption itself, handled by a province or territory, and the child's immigration afterwards, handled by the federal department. The person applying is the child, not the parent filling in a questionnaire, so our report has nothing to assess here. Read Canada's adopted child sponsorship, explained.

Temporary measures during a crisis

When a war or a disaster makes a place unsafe, a government sometimes adds a temporary set of rules on top of its ordinary programmes. Each one opens on a date and closes again, sometimes as soon as a fixed number of applications has been reached, so the honest answer changes over time and only the official page is reliable. Read Canada's special immigration measures.

Help with these routes is free

Official bodies, legal aid and community law services help with the routes on this page at no cost, and each guide above names them for its country. Nobody should be paying for access to protection.

If you do decide to pay someone for immigration advice about anything, ask for their licence or registration number first and check it with the regulator for the country you are applying to. Everything on this page, and every guide linked from it, is free to read.