OINP and a business sale: can the new owner support your application?

An owner decides to retire. A competitor makes an offer. A family business changes hands. Somewhere in the middle of that transaction is an employee whose permanent residence depends on the job offer that business made, and nobody at the closing table is thinking about them.

The answer to whether a new owner can support the application is not a single answer. It turns on two things: how the sale was structured, and where the application had got to when the deal closed. Get those two facts and the rest follows.

First, the ground has moved

The OINP was redesigned in 2026. The Employer Job Offer: Foreign Worker stream closed on 30 May 2026, and the remaining streams closed shortly after. The live employer-driven route is now the Ontario Workforce Priority stream. The employer architecture carried over largely intact, which matters here: the employer still applies for approval of an employment position through the employer portal, and that approval is still the foundation the nomination sits on.

Share sale or asset sale: this is the whole question

Almost everything else in this article is a consequence of this distinction, and most of the confusion I see comes from people who have not been told which kind of deal they are in.

In a share sale, the buyer purchases the shares of the corporation. The corporation itself does not change. Same legal entity, same business number, same employer of record, same employment contracts. Your employer has new owners; you do not have a new employer. In the ordinary case the job offer stands, the employment position approval stands, and the application is unaffected in substance.

In an asset sale, the buyer purchases the business assets and typically hires the staff into a different corporation. The vendor corporation still exists, but it no longer runs the business and no longer employs you. The purchaser is a stranger to your application: it did not make the job offer, it was not assessed, and it has never been approved as your employer. For OINP purposes that is a change of employer, not merely a change of ownership — a bigger evidentiary job, but not a dead end, for the reason set out next.

Ask for the answer in writing, and ask early. Vendors and purchasers are often vague about it in the weeks before closing, and the difference decides your file.

The three-year test attaches to the business, not to the owner

This is the point most commentary gets wrong, and it is worth being precise about. The requirement is that the business has been in active operation for at least three years. It is not a requirement that the current owner has owned it for three years.

Ontario says so directly. The employer checklist for the Ontario Workforce Priority stream carries the heading You purchased your business within the last three years, and sets out what follows: you may be required to submit documentation showing that the business was in continuous operation before you purchased it and that the purpose of the business remained the same after the purchase. The documents it names are the business financial statements signed by a CPA covering the three years before submission, the purchase agreement showing you bought the business, and any other proof the business had been active for three years.

So a ten-year-old business sold last month is not automatically a one-month-old employer. The predecessor history is available to the purchaser.

That is a route, not a formality. It moves the question from how long have you owned it to did the same business keep running, and it puts an evidentiary burden on the purchaser that the vendor records have to be able to satisfy. Ask for those records as part of the deal, while you still have leverage.

Where continuity actually breaks

Continuity is about the operation, not the paperwork. Buy a restaurant that has traded for ten years and carry on running the same restaurant, and the continuity case is strong. Buy the same restaurant, close the kitchen and use the premises and equipment for an unrelated software business, and it is not: Ontario looks at whether the purpose of the business remained the same, including whether the same products and services continued to be provided.

Two practical wrinkles sit underneath this. The Employer Portal administers employer accounts by Canada Revenue Agency business number, so an asset sale into a new corporation with a new business number is something to plan for rather than discover. And continuity answers only one requirement of several — the employer must still have Ontario premises, meet the revenue threshold (a minimum of $1,000,000 in gross annual revenue inside the Greater Toronto Area, or $500,000 outside it), meet the full-time employee counts (five inside the GTA, three outside), and have no outstanding orders under the Employment Standards Act, 2000 or the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

Where you are in the process

Before an expression of interest. The simplest place to be. If the purchasing entity qualifies on its own — and the three-year test is the one to check first — it registers in the employer portal and submits a job offer, and you register an EOI against it. Nothing is lost except time.

Between the invitation to apply and a decision. Section 13(5) of the Ontario Immigration Act, 2015 is engaged: where there is a material change in any of the information on which the application is based, including whether the applicant meets the eligibility criteria, the applicant shall promptly advise the director of the changes. A change of employer is a material change. This is not a discretionary courtesy, and concealing it is a great deal worse than reporting it.

After nomination. The OINP is blunt about this. The employer approval and its employment position form the basis of your nomination, and the program is unable to change an approved employment position after you are nominated. If your employment in the approved position ends and the approval is cancelled, the route back is a new expression of interest — with everything that implies about waiting for an invitation under whatever criteria apply at that time. The OINP runs post-nomination verification through a dedicated unit and is authorised to cancel approvals, including the nomination itself, where conditions are not met.

After permanent residence is granted. The nomination has done its work. What remains is the ordinary expectation that what you told IRCC and Ontario was true when you told it.

Employment continuity is not employer identity

Here is a trap that catches accountants and lawyers who do not practise immigration. Section 9 of Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, 2000 provides that where a business is sold and the purchaser employs an employee of the seller, the employment is deemed not to have been terminated, and service with the seller counts as service with the purchaser for calculating length of employment.

That is real, and it protects your notice and severance entitlements. It does not make the purchaser your approved OINP employer. The ESA is answering a different question — how long you have worked — not the question the OINP is asking, which is whether the entity offering you the job has been approved and still qualifies. A memo that says "employment is continuous under the ESA" is not an answer to the immigration problem.

The work permit problem nobody raises at closing

If you hold an employer-specific work permit, it names the employer you are authorised to work for. In an asset sale, the entity paying you after closing is not that employer. Working for the purchaser on a permit that names the vendor is working without authorisation, and it is the kind of problem that surfaces later, at exactly the wrong moment.

An LMIA is likewise issued to a named employer for a named position. It does not travel with the business.

So an asset sale can create two failures at once: the OINP employer approval and the work authorisation. They have to be solved separately, and the work permit usually has to be solved first.

What to do, in order

1. Find out which kind of sale it is. Shares or assets. In writing.
2. If shares: confirm the corporation is unchanged — same legal name, same business number, same employment agreement — and keep the closing documents. You may still be asked to prove the employer that was approved is the employer that exists.
3. If assets: build the continuity file now — CPA-signed financial statements covering the three years before submission, the purchase agreement, and evidence that the same operation, products and services carried on. Then test the purchaser against the rest: Ontario premises, revenue, employee counts, ESA and OHSA orders.
4. Report the change to the OINP in writing, promptly, at the stage you are at.
5. Check the work permit before the first shift for the new entity.

If you are the buyer and you want to keep the people, raise this in due diligence rather than after closing. The number of employees on employer-supported immigration files is a question worth asking, and it is cheap to ask.

If you are the worker, book a consultation as soon as you hear the word "sale". The options narrow fast once a deal closes, and almost every good outcome in this situation depends on having moved before the closing date rather than after it.

Sources: Ontario, Ontario Workforce Priority stream and the archived Employer Job Offer: Foreign Worker stream; the Ontario Workforce Priority stream employer checklist (updated 11 August 2026); Ontario Immigration Act, 2015, section 13(5); O. Reg. 422/17, section 4; Employment Standards Act, 2000, section 9. General information only, not legal advice. Deal structures differ and so do outcomes; obtain advice on your own transaction and your own file.