From Kakuma to Cancellation: How a Nova Scotia Care Home Quietly Pulled Job Offers From 18 Refugees in Kenya
After two years of medical exams, visa approvals, and language assessments, eighteen people in Kakuma and Dadaab were told their Canadian care-home jobs had quietly been filled locally.
In the long, dust-coloured stretch of northwestern Kenya where Kakuma sits, the path out has always been narrow. For more than thirty years, the camp has housed people whose home countries became uninhabitable: South Sudanese fleeing a civil war that never quite ended, Somalis from Mogadishu and Kismayo, Congolese from the eastern lakes, Ethiopians from the highlands. The exits are mostly imagined ones, the prized resettlement letter for a country in Europe or North America, a place to begin again with a job, a tax number, a winter coat.
For eighteen people in Kakuma and the neighbouring Dadaab camp, that letter arrived. It came from Canada, in the form of conditional job offers at a long-term care company in Nova Scotia called Northwood. They were vetted, interviewed, fingerprinted. They sat through English proficiency tests. They were given visas. They told their friends. Then, this year, the offers were withdrawn.
A pathway that promised much
The programme that linked Kakuma to Nova Scotia is one of Canada's more imaginative immigration experiments. It is called the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot, and the idea behind it is straightforward: Canada has labour shortages in care work, food processing and trades; refugee camps contain people with exactly those skills who cannot otherwise reach Canada through the points-based Express Entry system. The pilot, run by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada in partnership with non-profits including RefugePoint, aims to settle four thousand people a year by matching displaced workers to Canadian employers.
For the eighteen affected refugees in Kenya, the match was Northwood, which runs nursing homes, retirement residences and home-care services across Nova Scotia. The conditional offers were extended between September 2022 and December 2023. Some of the refugees, according to RefugePoint, had completed every step the federal government required of them, including medical examinations and confirmation that their visa applications had been approved. They were waiting for travel.
The phone call that ended the wait
Then, in messages relayed through case workers in Nairobi and Halifax, the news came: the positions had been filled. The roles for which they had spent two years preparing did not need them after all. Northwood's explanation was that, as the processing timelines stretched beyond what the company had anticipated and the demand on its services kept growing, it had hired locally instead. The organisation said it had successfully employed and supported the relocation of twelve other refugees who came through the same programme; this group of eighteen was the unlucky cohort whose paperwork moved too slowly.
For refugees on the receiving end of that explanation, the arithmetic was harder to accept. The years that had elapsed during processing were not idle ones. People had given notice to landlords inside the camps, packed and unpacked, written goodbye letters, told relatives back in South Sudan or Somalia that they were finally on their way. The Canadian visa stamped in a passport had become, for some, a piece of evidence shown to neighbours that the long wait had paid off. The cancellation took back not just a job but the public story of escape.
A programme caught in Canada's bigger reset
The Northwood story arrives at an awkward moment for the EMPP. Canada's broader immigration mood has cooled sharply. The 2026 to 2028 immigration plan unveiled last autumn caps permanent residents at 380,000 a year and announces a sharp 45 per cent cut to new temporary arrivals, including international students and foreign workers. The political pressure that produced those numbers, polling that showed declining public support for high immigration, frustration over housing prices in Toronto and Vancouver, has not spared programmes that were once celebrated as humanitarian successes.
Last December, the federal government quietly paused parts of the EMPP itself, citing backlog concerns. Refugee advocates in Ottawa say the pilot, which once carried a target of four thousand placements a year, has slowed dramatically as processing capacity is redirected to other categories. The optics of asking employers to wait two years for a refugee hire while local labour markets tighten, advocates concede, were always going to be difficult.
What RefugePoint did next
RefugePoint, the resettlement non-profit that had matched the eighteen refugees to Northwood, has formally ended its partnership with the Nova Scotia employer over the cancellations. In a statement, the organisation said the decision protected the integrity of the programme and signalled to other employers that conditional offers should be treated as binding once the federal process is underway. It has continued to place other refugees with other Canadian employers, including in Atlantic provinces, where labour shortages remain acute.
For the eighteen, however, the path forward is unclear. Some of their Canadian visas are still technically valid for a window of time, but a visa without a job offer in the EMPP does not, on its own, get a person on a flight. The refugees would need to either find another employer willing to take them under the pilot, or pivot back to the conventional resettlement queue, which can take many more years and which, after the federal cuts, is also moving more slowly than before.
Why this matters to a wider Kenyan story
Kakuma and Dadaab are not, strictly speaking, Kenyan-diaspora stories. The eighteen affected refugees are not Kenyan nationals; they are people Kenya has hosted for decades. But the camps are physically inside Kenya, run with the cooperation of Kenyan authorities, and the labour pathways that flow out of them are increasingly intertwined with the broader story of African migration to Canada that Kenyan professionals also follow closely. The same Express Entry pool that is now harder to enter, the same Atlantic provinces that have shortages, the same processing delays at IRCC, shape every African application file in motion right now.
For Kenyan nurses, software developers and care workers eyeing Canada in 2026, the Northwood cancellation lands less as an isolated incident and more as a data point. It says that Canada's immigration door, which had widened steadily for the better part of a decade, is now being narrowed in places no one quite expected. The pilots designed to fill gaps in the labour market are themselves slowing. The conditional offer that looked binding in 2022 was, in the end, conditional on more than the applicant's paperwork.
A community manager in Halifax who works with newcomers from East Africa put it more simply over the weekend, in a voice note that has been circulating on Kenyan WhatsApp groups in the Maritimes. The dream of Canada, she said, has not closed. It has just become a longer queue, with fewer guarantees, and a colder welcome at the end.
