Step 7: POE
IRCC will deliver a “Correspondence Letter” to your GCKey account. This is the work permit approval you’re waiting for.
Yay! Congrats!
The POE is the approval of the Working Holiday application. It is officially called Port of Entry (POE) Letter of Introduction. It is a letter that you will be issued a work permit at the Canadian border if you provide all required documents.
Very important:
Make sure to print this letter, or save it on your computer/laptop in three places or in your online storage cloud, so you can find it later.
The reason for that is, because the POE will automatically disappear from the GCKey account after some time (it’s a common glitch). The POE letter is the most important document in the entire Working Holiday Canada application process. Without this POE letter, there is no work permit at the border in Canada.
How long is the POE valid? Until when do I have to activate the work permit?
In general, you have 12 months to activate the work permit, however there is a 'but'
The Port of Entry (POE) Letter is valid for 12 months. This means you have 12 months to travel to Canada and activate the work permit. The date until which you can activate the work permit is printed on the POE letter.
This date cannot be extended. If you miss this date, you have to re-apply for the Working Holiday.
Now the ‘but’!
If you had a medical exam, the POE will be valid for 12 months after the date of the medical exam. This date will also be printed on your POE.
In the below example you will see the POE validity but also that there was a medical exam as part of the application. Because the date of the medical exam is earlier, you must activate the work permit latest on April 22, 2025 (in this example)
If you activate after April 22, then the medical exam is invalid and you will receive a work permit with restrictions. This means, that you will not be able to work in jobs that require a medical exam. More info on the medical exam here.
You can find a lot more questions answered > here < in this FAQ section.
Then it’s time to start planning your awesome Canadian adventure
