Active management in the Start-Up Visa queue

The Start-Up Visa program is closed to new applications. IRCC stopped accepting commitment certificates from designated organizations after 31 December 2025, and applicants who already held a valid 2025 commitment certificate had until 30 June 2026 to file. New organizations are not being designated.

Applications filed before that deadline continue to be processed. IRCC has indicated that it is prioritizing permanent residence applications from people who are already in Canada on a Start-Up Visa work permit. A substantial inventory of pending applications remains, and waits are long.

Closure to new intake does not relax the requirements for applications already in the queue. An application filed in 2023 is assessed against the same provisions as one filed in 2026, on the evidence available when an officer reaches it - which, for a file that has been waiting several years, means evidence about what the business has been doing throughout that period.

Subsection 98.06(1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations sets out four characteristics of a qualifying business. Each is assessed on evidence, not assertion.

1. 01Active and ongoing management from within Canada. The applicant is expected to be directing the business, and to be doing that from inside Canada rather than at a distance. Occasional remote involvement is a weak answer to this requirement.
2. 02An essential part of operations carried on in Canada. The substantive work of the business - building, selling, serving customers - has to happen here. A registration and a mailing address are not operations.
3. 03Incorporation in Canada.
4. 04An ownership structure that meets the prescribed percentages. Each applicant must hold at least 10 percent of the voting rights attached to all outstanding shares, and the applicants, together with the designated organization, must jointly hold more than 50 percent of the total voting rights.

Subsection 98.06(2) contains an exception that is often read too broadly. A business that does not yet meet the management, operations, or incorporation requirements is still a qualifying business if the applicant intends to meet them once a permanent resident visa has been issued. That exception speaks to whether the business qualifies. It does not answer the separate question of whether the arrangement was genuine, and it is that second question where most refusals are decided.

Section 89 of the Regulations provides that an applicant has not met the requirements of the Division where those requirements are satisfied through transactions entered into primarily to acquire a status or privilege under the Act, rather than for the purpose of engaging in the business activity the commitment was intended to support.

In practice this is a question about purpose: was the arrangement assembled to build a company, or to obtain a visa? An officer answers it from the file as a whole - the substance of the business plan, the conduct of the founders, the progress of the venture, and the consistency between what the commitment certificate described and what actually happened afterwards. A finding under this section is not cured by pointing to an intention to comply later.

1. 01Yang v. Canada (2019 FC 130). The Court accepted that a lack of seriousness in research and due diligence, together with thin evidence from both the applicant and the designated entity, could support a finding that the primary intention was immigration rather than business. Generic planning invites the inference.
2. 02Kwan v. Canada (2019 FC 92). Applicants are not required to start the business before permanent residence. But where a work permit is obtained and the business is started, the progress made and the applicant's involvement in it can be used to assess primary intention. The officer relied on the gap between what the commitment certificate described - full-time roles in Vancouver, urgent business reasons to come, a year of incubation - and an applicant who entered Canada in February 2017 and returned home about three weeks later. The refusal was upheld.
3. 03Damangir v. Canada (2024 FC 599). An applicant identified as essential to the business had not disclosed an earlier visa refusal and was found inadmissible on that basis. Under subsection 98.08(2), the refusal of an essential applicant requires the refusal of every other applicant attached to the same business, and the rest of the team was refused for that reason alone, after roughly three years in processing.
4. 04Punjwani v. Canada (2026 FC 1033). A finding under paragraph 89(b) against one essential applicant again carried the other applicants with it under subsection 98.08(2). The Court confirmed that the subsection 98.06(2) exception does not answer a genuineness finding, and that an officer's conclusion rests on the totality of the evidence rather than on any single concern taken alone.

Two themes run through these decisions. The first is that documented substance carries the application: what was actually built, sold, and decided. The second is that a team application is only as strong as each essential member, because one refusal on any ground can end the applications of everyone attached to the same business.

These requirements are assessed on the record in front of the officer. The practical implication is that the record should accumulate continuously, as the business operates, rather than be assembled when a request arrives. Contemporaneous documents carry weight that later summaries cannot: a dated artifact created in the ordinary course of business is evidence of what was happening at the time.

1. 01Product development. Dated evidence of what has been built - repositories and commit history, design files, prototypes, technical documentation, release notes.
2. 02Commercial traction in Canada. Letters of intent from Canadian customers, pilot and supplier agreements, invoices, and market research addressed to the Canadian market rather than adapted from another one.
3. 03Governance. Board and shareholder minutes, a maintained cap table, intellectual property filings, bookkeeping and financial statements, and the corporate filings that keep the company in good standing.
4. 04Role alignment. Evidence that each founder is performing the function the commitment certificate described, since the whole team depends on each essential member.
5. 05Management and presence. Records showing where the business is actually directed from: where decisions are taken and minuted, where the team works, where operations sit.

Keep the file coherent as well as complete. Where the business has changed direction since the commitment certificate was signed - as real companies do - the reasoning behind that change is worth documenting at the time, so that a difference between the original plan and current operations reads as ordinary commercial judgment rather than as an unexplained discrepancy.

Structured program activity generates records as a by-product. Objective cycles, session records, mentor engagement, and periodic progress reporting produce dated, contemporaneous documentation of what a company worked on and when. That is the same category of record described above, created in the ordinary course rather than for a filing.

That is a practical benefit and nothing more. Participation in a program does not satisfy any requirement of the Regulations, and no program can determine or improve how an application is assessed. Responsibility for an application and for the evidence supporting it rests with the founder and their counsel. CI Ventures is not a designated entity: the commitment relationship runs between an applicant and their designated organization, and questions about a commitment certificate belong with that organization and with counsel.