The gap is rarely competence. It is scope language, evidence and the screening layer between you and a human reader.
A control systems engineer who has personally kept a refinery's safety instrumented systems running for eight years will frequently be screened out of a Canadian role that asks for three years of relevant experience. This is not primarily discrimination, and treating it as such leads to the wrong remedy.
The first cause is scope language. Titles do not travel. A role described as Officer or Analyst in one market maps to Lead or Manager in another, and a résumé that repeats the original title without describing scope hands the reader no way to calibrate.
The second cause is evidence. Canadian hiring norms expect quantified outcomes: throughput, downtime, budget, headcount, percentage change. Narrative descriptions of duties, which are conventional in many markets, read as vague.
The third cause is mechanical. Applicant tracking systems match against the posting's vocabulary. A résumé that says instrumentation where the posting says industrial control systems can score below a weaker candidate who used the posting's phrase.
None of these require inventing experience. They require describing real experience in the receiving market's terms, which is a translation task, and translation is learnable.