More than 230 Romanians have applied for permanent residence in Canada after the removal of the Ottawa visa regime for Bulgarians and Romanians since December last year, Canadian Assistant Deputy Minister for Immigration Affairs Paul McKinnon said. Before the Immigration Parliamentary Commission in Ottawa, he reported that Canada reported a significant increase in Romanian requests, while there was no change in the Bulgarians and applications remained a little, said Globe and Mail.

232 Romanians have asked to settle in Canada after December 2017, when the visa requirement was lifted, McKinan said. Previously, the total was "very low". In response to a question from the opposition, he said that it is currently difficult to determine whether the trend will continue, or it is a temporary boom related to the recent visa waiver.

Canada abolished the visa restrictions for Bulgarians and Romanians from 1 December 2017. Ottawa inclined the measure to get support for the signing of the EU-Free Trade Agreement.

During the hearing in the parliamentary committee, which was also attended by Minister of Immigration Ahmed Hussein and his deputy Martha Morgan, McKinnon told MPs that there was a negotiated threshold for resettlement applications that should not be exceeded in order not to reach return of the visa regime. "We met with the Romanian ambassador to Ottawa, and they work closely with us, and they want just like us the visa-free regime for Romania to be sustainable," he said. McKinnon did not want to answer a parliamentary question about the agreed threshold and what number of requests should not be exceeded.

Romanians are starting to immigrate to Canada after 1998, the second such wave since the fall of communism in 1989. 2004 is a peak for Romanian immigration in Canada when about 5,500 Romanians moved in the North American country. Since then, the number of Romanians arriving in the country has been decreasing gradually, writes Romana Libera. Now there are 400,000 Canadians of Romanian origin.

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