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Canada beckons 'thousands' of software engineers

Ajit Jain in Toronto

If you are a software engineer interested in working in Canada, pack your bags and get ready to leave.

Under a new scheme, part of the country's budget that was presented by Finance Minister Paul Martin to the House of Commons on Monday, the Immigration Department will open the doors to 'many thousands' of software specialists to come to Canada.

A sum of $24-million has been allocated in the budget for the Department of Human Resources Development. This amount will pay for the department to work out the needs of specific industries so that those who are offered jobs can quickly obtain visas to come to Canada, said Immigration and Citizenship Minister Elinor Caplan on Tuesday.

This is part of temporary foreign workers' program which is "very important to my department (as) we are talking about many, many thousands (of temporary workers)," Caplan said in Ottawa.

This is an expansion of a programme that applied to software specialists which saw 70,854 temporary workers come to Canada since the beginning of 2000, she said.

India is the source for largest number of software specialists and programmers. Now Indian software engineers keen to work on a temporary basis in Canada will not find it very difficult to get temporary visas. They can get job offers by reaching out to major Canadian companies.

Sources said that these temporary visas could become permanent ones as there is an acute shortage of software specialists in Canada.

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