The provincial department of immigration is pausing their application and job vacancy assessments while they make some changes to how applications are processed in their back end.

On Friday, the government revealed that Ottawa is increasing its economic immigration allotment by 1,000 spaces in exchange for taking in more humanitarian migrants.

While that is an improvement from the 50 per cent cut in immigration spaces announced in early January, it is still a reduction of 17 per cent from where the province was last year.

In response to those initial cuts, Minister Sarah Stoodley says they had to look at ways to maximize their spaces, so they initiated some IT changes to streamline processing and create new tools for employers to find candidates.

To implement the changes, the government is pausing the intake of new economic immigration applications and job vacancy assessments until mid-February.

Stoodley says the changes will result in a “much more flexible system,” but doesn’t believe it will necessarily result in quicker timelines for applicants.

She says it will help them better prioritize and figure out where people’s skills are and where they still need to recruit. It will also help them plan to make sure they have some spaces left over toward the end of the year for people like doctors.