Ontario Streams Candidates Into Express Entry Through Its Workforce Priority Option
An Ontario employer in Mississauga has just finished interviewing a mechanical engineer from Durban over video call. The offer’s ready. What the employer does next — inside a stream barely two months old at time of writing — decides whether that engineer’s file even touches the federal points system, because the ontario workforce priority stream express entry option is exactly that: optional, not automatic.
What replaced Ontario’s old system
On 30 May 2026, Ontario Regulation 47/26 revoked all nine of the province’s previous nomination streams in one move — Human Capital Priorities, both Employer Job Offer streams, the graduate and French-speaking streams, Skilled Trades, Entrepreneur, all of it. On 26 June 2026, the single replacement launched: the Ontario Workforce Priority stream, described by Ontario itself as Phase 1 of a two-phase redesign, with Phase 2 pathways announced only in principle so far.
How the employer-driven process actually runs
The employer starts everything. It must have operated for at least three years, hold Ontario premises, show genuine recruitment effort, meet Ontario’s wage standards, and employ a minimum share of Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Once it makes a qualifying job offer, the candidate has 30 days to register an Expression of Interest, gets ranked by a points formula, and — if invited — has just 17 calendar days to file the full nomination application.
The optional nomination, and its Express Entry angle
This is the ontario workforce priority optional nomination piece: candidates in TEER 0–3 occupations may choose to have their nomination attached to a live Express Entry profile instead of applying through the base, non-Express-Entry route. Does Ontario Workforce Priority add 600 CRS points? Only if you elect that option — a successful nomination then adds the standard 600 points, which in practice all but guarantees an invitation at the next federal round you’re eligible for. Skip the election, and the nomination goes through Ontario’s own slower application instead. One stream, two very different speeds, and the candidate chooses which.
The one scoring detail worth knowing before you start
Ontario’s points formula weighs the job’s TEER level, wage, prior Ontario experience, education, language — and, distinctively, where the job actually is. Northern Ontario postings score 15 points; a Toronto posting scores zero. That geography rule is easy to miss if you only skim this stream’s basics, but it’s worth building into any comparison between two otherwise similar offers.
There’s a separate, job-offer-free route within the same stream for physicians already holding an OHIP billing number and College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario membership — a narrow exception rather than the general rule, but worth knowing if it describes your situation.
What a specific employer’s offer or your own occupation code means for eligibility is a question for a licensed RCIC working from the actual documents — this is a description of how the stream is built, not an assessment of any one file. We keep our provincial stream summaries updated as Ontario rolls out Phase 2, so check back before assuming today’s rules still hold.