If You Really Mean It...

...about moving to Canada, I mean, here's your starting point.

I've had (no kidding) a half-dozen e-mails in the hour or so since I offered to a Shaker who declared she was moving to Canada that I would be happy to help her with job-finding resources, immigration resources, that kind of thing.

So, in order to get back a bit of time in my day, I'm centralizing my response. The intent for this post is to be a place to gather up a whole whack of useful links for those Americans who really do feel they'd be happier north of the border. You certainly won't be alone! In my personal monkeysphere of 150 or so friends, I can think of probably twenty who were, as the man said, Born in the USA. Maybe more, as I ponder it.

I will offer one warning: it's not instant. On average, the Immigration Canada website says it takes about 22 months for American immigrants to arrive in Canada after application, and you can expect the application itself to take several months to assemble. Note that there's a fair old bit of privilege at work here: immigration from other parts of the world is frequently much, much slower, despite Canada's world-high immigration rate. As an example of that rate, the company I'm currently contracting with has 15 employees. Not one (including me) was born in this country.

I'll encourage my fellow Canucks to pitch in with any links or resources they can offer, and will be editing the post to move things into a more visible place as links come in. A quick sample of ones I have of my own, to start us off*:

Immigration-related:

Immigration Canada: the ministry responsible for (duh) immigration.

General Employment:

HRDC Job Bank: the Job Bank of Human Resources Development Canada, the ministry responsible for employment.
Monster.ca: The Canada-focused version of the popular jobseekers' site.
Bilingual Source: A job agency specializing in placing bilingual people.
Workopolis: Another useful site, with plenty of Canadian positions to look at.

Regional employment:
Gary Will: a site focused on high-tech employers in the Kitchener-Waterloo region (about an hour west of Toronto, this is Canada's San Jose Valley, the home of a good chunk of our high-tech industry, including Blackberry-makers RIM)

Industry-specific:
Society for Technical Communicators: The Canadian technical writers' professional organization, which maintains a job bank for both permanent and temporary positions - I believe you have to get membership to access their bank, but if you're a tech writer moving here, you'd want to do that anyway.
Charity Village: a site focused on employment in the non-profit sector.