Arrima (Quebec Expression of Interest)

Arrima is the official online portal operated by Quebec's ministère de l'Immigration, de la Francisation et de l'Intégration (MIFI) for managing permanent and temporary immigration files, including the province's main economic immigration stream. It is not a federal government system and it is not connected to Express Entry; Quebec selects its own economic immigrants under an agreement with the federal government, and Arrima is the tool it uses to do that. The portal's central function today is the Programme de sélection des travailleurs qualifiés (PSTQ), which replaced the former Programme régulier des travailleurs qualifiés (PRTQ) on November 29, 2024. The PSTQ is organized into four volets, or streams: Volet 1 for highly qualified and specialized occupations, Volet 2 for intermediate and manual occupations, Volet 3 for regulated professions that require a licence or permit to practise in Quebec, and Volet 4 for exceptional talent. Beyond the PSTQ, Arrima also handles the Programme de l'expérience québécoise (PEQ), the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, document submission for international students, and an Employer Portal used by businesses recruiting abroad, so a single Arrima account can touch several different Quebec immigration processes depending on which service is selected inside it.

Access to Arrima is through Quebec's official government site, and the portal distinguishes between three types of accounts: an individual account for a person declaring interest in immigrating on their own behalf, a business account for employers, which requires a valid Quebec enterprise number (NEQ) and is used through the separate Employer Portal, and a representative account for immigration consultants or lawyers formally authorized to act for a client. A large share of the confusion behind searches for an Arrima login or Arrima portal traces back to mixing up these three account types — an employer trying to sign in through the individual candidate flow, or a candidate assuming their personal profile also gives them employer-side visibility, will each hit a dead end. Setting up an individual account takes only a few minutes and does not expire once validated, but the account itself is distinct from the declaration of interest filed inside it, since the account can remain open indefinitely while the declaration has its own separate validity period, described below. Anyone who has lost access to an existing account should use Quebec's own account-recovery options rather than create a duplicate profile, since having more than one account under different details can complicate matching a person to their eventual invitation and application.

Once inside an individual account, a candidate completes a declaration of interest, sometimes still called an expression of interest, covering education, work experience, language ability in French and English, and other factors tied to the stream they expect to qualify under. Filing a declaration of interest is free. From the day it is submitted, it remains valid for one full year; if a declaration is started but left unfinished, it is deleted after 90 days without being submitted. A declaration that reaches the end of its 12-month validity without generating an invitation cannot be extended or renewed — the candidate has to create a new one from scratch, again at no cost, and can update an existing declaration at any time in the meantime as their circumstances change. It is worth being precise about what a declaration of interest actually is: it is not an application for permanent residence. It is a statement of eligibility and interest that places the candidate in a pool the ministry can draw from; nothing is examined or decided at that stage, and no immigration status results from filing one.

The ministry periodically draws candidates from the declaration pool and issues invitations to apply, generally through rounds specific to each PSTQ stream. Selection within a round depends on a points-based evaluation of the same factors captured in the declaration — occupation and its classification, length and location of work experience, and education, and particularly French-language ability, since French proficiency thresholds are built into eligibility for most streams rather than treated as a bonus. Results of each round, including which streams were drawn and how many people were invited, are published on Quebec's official immigration pages. As of mid-2026, PSTQ invitation rounds have continued on a roughly monthly basis through the year, with no indication on the government's own results pages that the program itself has been paused. The picture is different for the separate PEQ: both of its streams were closed to new applicants on November 19, 2025, and the government temporarily reopened PEQ for a two-year window running from July 2, 2026 to July 2, 2028, with applications accepted only between July 2 and October 31, 2026 — and only from people who already met the program's requirements as of the November 19, 2025 cutoff, not from anyone who becomes eligible afterward. Because this reopening is narrow, time-limited, and could change again, anyone considering the PEQ route specifically should confirm the current window and eligibility cutoff directly on Quebec's official immigration pages rather than relying on older or third-party summaries, including this one.

Receiving an invitation is not the same as being approved. An invited candidate generally has 60 days from the date of acceptance to submit a complete application for permanent selection, or up to one year if they are still waiting on a regulatory body to formally recognize their professional qualifications, which mainly affects Volet 3 candidates in regulated professions. Applications are submitted with scanned supporting documents and are examined for a fee that is adjusted every January 1; as of January 1, 2026, the fee is $940 CAD for the main applicant plus $201 CAD for each accompanying family member, paid by credit card inside Arrima and non-refundable even if the application is refused. An approved application results in a Certificat de sélection du Québec (CSQ), which confirms Quebec's selection but is still not permanent residence. The CSQ has to be paired with a separate federal application to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC); Quebec selects who it wants as an economic immigrant, but the federal government still conducts its own medical, criminal, and security checks before granting permanent residence. Candidates who are already living and working in Quebec during this stage need to keep their own work or study permit valid throughout, since a CSQ or a pending federal application does not by itself extend legal status in Canada.

The most common misunderstanding is treating Arrima as though it were Quebec's version of Express Entry; it is a related but structurally separate system, run by a provincial ministry rather than IRCC, with its own account types, its own declaration process, and its own selection rounds. A second common mistake is assuming that submitting a declaration of interest is equivalent to applying — it only opens the possibility of an invitation, and a candidate who never updates a stale or inaccurate declaration reduces their own chances of being drawn accurately. A third is letting a declaration expire without realizing it, since Arrima will not renew one automatically after 12 months. Candidates evaluating a regulated profession under Volet 3 sometimes also underestimate how long formal recognition of foreign qualifications takes, which is precisely why the post-invitation deadline extends to a year in that situation. Finally, because PEQ and PSTQ overlap in who can use them and both run through the same portal, candidates who qualify under both sometimes wonder whether applying to one affects the other; the government has stated that the two are processed in parallel, with no priority given to either and separate fees for each, so filing one does not substitute for or accelerate the other.