A member calculating one year of Canadian Experience Class (CEC) work experience had spent 52 days outside Canada — 14 days paid vacation, 16 weekend days, 2 public holidays, and 20 days working remotely from abroad — and asked how much to push back their eligibility date. The group's working consensus (peer opinion, not legal advice):
- Weekends generally don't count against you. CEC experience is counted as roughly 30 hours/week of work in Canada, so being outside Canada on non-working weekend days shouldn't reduce the total.
- A reasonable amount of paid vacation is usually accepted. Members felt around 2–3 weeks of paid leave within the year is tolerated as part of normal full-time employment.
- Days worked remotely from outside Canada are the real problem. Work physically performed abroad does not count as Canadian work experience. The consensus: delay the application by the ~20 working days spent working from abroad.
- When in doubt, pad the timeline. One member in a similar situation (long weekends in the US plus 4 weeks vacation abroad) simply delayed submission to cover the questionable days rather than argue the edge case.
Practical approach: keep a precise day-by-day record, exclude any days worked outside Canada from your one-year count, and submit only once the clean in-Canada working time clearly totals the required period.