Tories Speeding Up Family Class Through “Super Visa” For Parents-Grandparents But Sponsors On Hook For Medical Expenses

Canada Will Also Admit Nearly 10,000 More Permanent Sponsored Family Class Immigrants In 2012 But Has Stopped Accepting Family Class Applications As Of Today

The government says it is bringing in the new “Parent and Grandparent Super Visa,” which will be valid for up to 10 years. The multiple-entry visa will allow an applicant to remain in Canada for up to 24 months at a time without the need for renewal of their status. The Parent and Grandparent Super Visa will come into effect on December 1, 2011, and CIC will be able to issue the visas, on average, within eight weeks of the application. Parent and Grandparent Super Visa applicants will be required to obtain private Canadian health-care insurance for their stay in Canada.

By R. Paul Dhillon

OTTAWA – The Tory government’s overly active immigration minister Jason Kenney, who has been criticized for policies that are aimed at restricting family class immigration over economic class, thereby reducing immigration from two Asian hubs of China and India, has pulled a rabbit out of the hat and magically transformed the immigration system especially when it comes to family class.

But the smoke and mirrors Kenney has given a little and perhaps take a lot.

In a series of announcements on immigration – including increasing the number of foreign students allowed in – Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Kenney announced on Friday that his government is taking immediate action to cut the backlog and wait times for sponsored parents and grandparents through a combinations of Super Visa and increase in the number of permanent family class immigrants allowed in 2012.

But the new offering comes with Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) not accepting any more family class applications for two years beginning from November 5 (today).

Currently, more than 165,000 parents and grandparents who have applied to become permanent residents of Canada are still waiting for a final decision. Each year, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) receives applications for sponsorship of nearly 38,000 parents and grandparents, a number that will only continue to expand if no action is taken, Kenney said.

“Wait times for Family Class sponsorship applications for parents and grandparents now exceed seven years, and without taking action, those times will continue to grow, and that is unacceptable,” Kenney said. “Action must be taken to cut the backlog, reduce the wait times, and ensure that the parents and grandparents program is sustainable over the long run.”

To deal with the large backlog and lengthy wait times, CIC is announced Phase I of the Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification.

During this phase, there will be an increase by over 60 percent the number of sponsored parents and grandparents Canada will admit next year, from nearly 15,500 in 2010 to 25,000 in 2012 – the highest level in nearly two decades.

Kenney also introduced the new “Parent and Grandparent Super Visa,” which will be valid for up to 10 years. The multiple-entry visa will allow an applicant to remain in Canada for up to 24 months at a time without the need for renewal of their status.

The Parent and Grandparent Super Visa will come into effect on December 1, 2011, and CIC will be able to issue the visas, on average, within eight weeks of the application. This means that instead of waiting for eight years, a parent or a grandparent can come to Canada within eight weeks.

Parent and Grandparent Super Visa applicants will be required to obtain private Canadian health-care insurance for their stay in Canada. The government has cleverly shifted the financial burden on to immigrant families while making the family reunification quick and convenient for those wanting to bring family members from their home nations. Most immigrants will be happy that they can get their family members to come quickly without long delays and frustration with CIC.

While Kenney seems to be making a peace offering with Friday’s announcements of easing the family class immigration – he warned that the government will consult Canadians on how to redesign the parents and grandparents program to ensure that it is sustainable in the future.

“The redesigned program must avoid future large backlogs and be sensitive to fiscal constraints,” hew said

To prevent the build-up of an unmanageable number of new applications during these consultations and to further reduce the 165,000-strong backlog of parent and grandparent applicants, CIC is putting in place a temporary pause of up to 24 months on the acceptance of new sponsorship applications for parents and grandparents. The pause comes into effect on November 5, 2011.

“The Government of Canada is fully committed to helping families reunite,” Kenney said. “We recognize that what parents and grandparents want most is to be able to spend time with their families.”

“If we do not take real action now, the large and growing backlog in the parents and grandparents program will lead to completely unmanageable wait times. Through this balanced series of measures, we will be able to dramatically reduce the backlog and wait times, while the new Parent and Grandparent Super Visa will allow more family members to pay extended visits to their loved ones. We anticipate that in about two years, following our consultations, Phase II of our Action Plan for Faster Family Reunification will come into effect, ensuring that future applicants are processed quickly and that the program can operate on an efficient and sustainable basis.,” Kenney added

There has been increasing criticism in the immigrant communities, including the two biggest – Chinese and South Asian – that Kenney is doing what the Conservatives agenda has been all along to reduce immigration from the hot spots in Asia and his policies point to that.

It is also pointed out that Kenney’s immigration numbers keep changing but the real issue is that the new restrictions and enforcement at the CIC means that for the first time the Immigration Minister has a lot of control in being effective in terms of who gets in and from where. And Friday’s announcement points to that dramatic shift with Kenney dramatically changing the way immigration to Canada will be shaped.

Kenney said this week that there will be more parents and grandparents coming but less spouses and dependent children. Kenney says it is because spouses and children are not coming in large numbers as in the past.

But  the main reason for this shift is his policies which have brought new restrictions, making it extremely difficult to get immigration. So in this case – it is Kenney’s own policies which are making his objective of having fewer immigrants in that category a reality. In this case – the methodology ensures that the results are what the government of the day’s agenda is and has been for a long time.

While most immigrants given the choice between having their loved ones be able to come quickly to visit and stay with them for a lengthy period of time – Friday’s announcement of Super Visa does give immigrants something to rejoice about even thought they potentially could be stuck with hefty medical bills which they may not be able to afford.

But the outright stoppage of taking family sponsorship applications for two years will not be met with joy from the immigrant communities but Kenney has shown that he is a good juggler with giving something while taking away a lot.

The family sponsorship waiting times has increased from normally 1-2 years to more than seven years. So what this is doing causing people to become frustrated and obviously this discouragement is stopping them from applying because it takes too long to process. And by reducing the family class immigration- which has the largest group of immigrants coming from Asia – specifically from China and India – it is affecting this large group and reducing the demand.

And this is certainly a concerted, directed effort on part of the Tories to do this as they realize that the mix from Asia is getting bigger and  bigger every year. It is also based on data that in 2030 – visible minority immigrants will overtake the non-visible minority population in Canada.

It is nothing new  as many European countries are full out in tackling this concern of foreign immigrants in their land but at least they are vocal with their potential racism out in the open. While they are openly saying that they are doing it – but here the Tories are hiding behind this wall of nothing’s changed really – just taking immigration policies in a different direction.

The LINK recently did a story where we quoted the Toronto Star on 2011 data showing immigrants to Canada dropped by 25 percent. Here is what Toronto Star wrote: . “In fact in the first quarter of 2011 – there already has been a decrease of 25 per cent fewer immigrants coming to Canada compared to the same period in 2010. The number of permanent resident visas issued by Citizenship and Immigration Canada between January and March fell from 84,083 in 2010 to 63,224 this year, according to figures obtained by the Toronto Star.”

But you do have to give Kenney some credit for pulling that rabbit out of the hat. He is keeping those Canadians happy who are anti-immigrant and want immigration curtailed while satisfying Conservatives’ new found ethnic voters who would like an immigration policy that allows their loved ones to come and go as they please.

Canada’s hard hat economy a ticket to the middle class

John Greenwood  Nov 5, 2011 – 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Nov 4, 2011 3:21 PM ET

Look out over most Canadian cities and you see construction cranes dotting the skyline, dozens of them and maybe more if you live in Vancouver or Toronto, the epicentre of a building boom that has been gaining steam for the better part of a decade.

Primarily the activity is around condos but there’s also hospitals, roads, sports stadiums and office towers — not to mention Alberta’s oil sands.

As the rest of the world grapples with the European financial crisis and sluggish growth in the United States, the cross-country construction boom has been Canada’s ace in the hole, providing the key economic building block that has been so lacking around the world: jobs.

While the savage housing collapse in the United States has left employment in the construction down 6.7-million from its 2008 peak, the number employed in Canada has soared to a record over the past two years. Even after a 20,100 give-back in October as the labour market softened overall, employment in the sector stood at 1.257-million, just above the previous November 2008 high.

The boom, supported by low interest rates, has helped spurred a virtuous cycle of job creation and consumer spending that has allowed the domestic economy to push ahead despite international turmoil.

“The great thing about construction is that it’s so local,” said Helmut Pastrick, chief economist for Central Credit Union 1, the main trade association for credit unions in British Columbia and Ontario. Unlike sectors like, say, banking or shipping where operations are often spread across a large geographically area, construction is much more focused, so the economic benefits stay local as well.

That goes especially for labour, which can’t be outsourced and provides one of the few sources of well-paying jobs to unskilled or unqualified workers such as immigrants, a key factor to the health of communities given this country’s traditionally high immigration rate.

That is the other thing. Unlike most other manual labour, it’s relatively well-paid. Due to labour shortages and high turnover, employers are willing to loosen the purse strings to keep valued workers. That means some take home $150,000 -plus a year.

For an immigrant from Guatamala or Somalia or Portugal, it’s a ticket to middle-class life and a future, as it was for successive waves of new Canadians going back more than a century. Inside FP Reporter John Greenwood chronicles the stories from Canada’s hard hat nation:

Santiago Martine has been working construction for 17 years, day in, day out, winter and summer.

A carpenter, Mr. Martine has been part of the work crew at a condo project on Toronto’s Queen Street West for the past six months, stripping formwork off concrete walls and pillars.

Next door, a massive new mental health centre is going up while across the road another condo tower is taking shape. The street is clogged with delivery vans and cement trucks while the local coffee shops are clearly benefiting from the hard-hat trade.

Asked what the boom means to him, Mr. Martine looks around at all the building activity.

“It’s amazing,” he says with a grin. “This means more money for families, more stability.”

If there is such a thing as a Canadian Dream, he has achieved it.

Born in Ecuador, he emigrated to Canada in the early 1990s in his mid-20s. He has raised three sons (one is in university, another in construction and the third owns his own company). He’s also helped his mother, his sister and her husband to follow him to settle in Canada as well.

A broad-shouldered man with his hair in a ponytail, Mr. Martine speaks with a mild accent.

Construction jobs are demanding, but the pay checks are generous. As a union member, he makes about $34 and hour and a lot more for overtime.

“I had the opportunity to go to Alberta but I didn’t go,” he says. “I got kids here, I got a wife here. The most important thing is family.”

Evaristo Rei and Domenic DiIorio first met as apprentice electricians 22 years ago and they’ve been working together on and off ever since.

Mr. Rei, who goes by “Everett” when he’s with friends, is a foreman. Both are part of a team of half a dozen electricians at a 20-floor condo tower at the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair.

For Mr. Rei, 45, the construction boom is a double-edged sword.

No one who wants to work is without a job for long. The trouble is, it’s hard to find good workers when you need them.

A slim, wiry man, he appraises a visitor with a critical eye, like he’s on the lookout for mistakes.

“I hear there’s more cranes in Toronto than any other city in the world,” he says during a coffee break. “So it’s good. But at the back of your mind you’re wondering who’s buying all the condos. But they wouldn’t be building them if people weren’t buying them.”

Mr. DiIorio has been working steadily since the recession of early 1990s when he briefly made a living doing home repairs.

“I was a ‘Mr. Handyman,’” he says.

Both men have always stayed close to Toronto, despite the allure of Alberta where a person with a half-decent trade can pay off a new pickup in two months if they’re lucky.

“We work for a good company,” says Mr. Rei. “They take care of their people, it’s not just about profit. There’s not a lot of companies like that.”

Like many in the industry, they live outside the city where houses are more affordable.

Mr. DiIorio, 42, lives in Brampton while his friend lives in Bolton. Both get up around 5am and get home around 12 hours later.

Most sites are a United Nations smorgasbord of nationalities, unlike previous decades when Italian and Portuguese were the predominant languages.

“You wouldn’t believe how far guys come,” says Mr. DiIorio. “But jeeze, there’s a lot of work. Just look at all the cranes!”

At 66 George Battaglin has just about seen it all. Trained as an architect, he’s currently a site manager for a small contracting company in Woodbridge but he’s been in the business for 41 years.

Construction “can be a good life for someone,” he says. “I think it’s a great industry – I mean, it powers the whole frickin’ city.”

Mr. Battaglin gave retirement a shot a while back but it didn’t appeal. “I was going nuts,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll ever retire. I’ll keep working as long as they’ll have me.”

Divorced, he has three grown kids and he lives in the suburb of Etobicoke. Over the years he’s worked in plenty of places, including Florida where he spent 13 years starting in the mid 1990s, and Alberta where he did a stint in the 1980s.

For the past several months he’s been working on a tower in downtown Toronto, and it’s been a challenge. The site itself is small with little room for storage and the traffic is always thick, making it almost impossible to get materials unloaded.

Lots of people would love to have jobs here but they lack the skills people like Mr. Battaglin are looking for. “We’re talking about craftsmen,” he explains. “When there’s so much work it’s hard to find them.”

It’s lunchtime and Bill White, a sheet metal worker, is sitting on a bench outside the CamH Centre for Addiction and Mental Health site on Queen Street, surrounded by a dozen other metal workers.

These are the guys who build the heating systems found in most modern buildings, and these days confidence is high around such trades.

“You can pick and choose [who you work for],” says Mr. White, a talkative man with a broad grin. He’s been contacted in recent weeks by three different companies looking to offer him a job.

At the same time he adds hastily, “I’m a pretty faithful guy,” having worked for his current employer for eight months. Indeed, once he worked for a company for 15 years.

There has been a lot of griping in the industry about the labour shortage, but according to Mr. White, they have only themselves to blame.

“The average guy is in his 50s and they’re only figuring out now that people are getting ready to retire,” says Mr. White.

The flow of young workers entering the trade got stopped cold in the last downturn in the late 1980s when high schools began cutting back on shop classes.

“They ripped all the shops out of the highs schools and put in dance studios!” declares Mr. White, who pauses a moment to give his colleagues time to agree. “That’s why they don’t have any young people. Dance studios! How do you make money out of that?”

Fernando Canonico, 38, is one of the youngest in the group of metal workers lounging on the grass beside Mr. White. Married with two kids, he lives in the bedroom community of Whitby about 45 minutes east of Toronto. His day starts early, at about 4:15 am, so he can get to work by 6:30 when his shift begins. If he’s lucky with the traffic, he can be back home by 6:00 pm.

The hours are demanding but Mr. Canonico is happy with his job. In a good year he makes at least $80,000, a lot more if he gets overtime since he gets paid at twice the normal hourly rate.

“I’ve never seen it as busy as it is now,” he says happily.

Mr. Canonico originally trained as a butcher but he didn’t like the work. So about 12 years ago, on the advice of his metal worker father-in-law he switched careers.

“This is a lot more fun,” he says.

Posted in: Economy  Tags: Boom, Canada, Condos, Construction

JOHN GREENWOOD

jgreenwood@nationalpost.com

• Mark of distinction

Canada: A nice place to visit but you can’t apply to live here

Nicholas KeungImmigration Reporter
Source: the start.com

Starting today, Ottawa will stop accepting applications for immigration sponsorships of parents and grandparents until 2014 in hopes of reducing a growing backlog.

In launching the first phase of an action plan to expedite family reunification Friday, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said the federal government will take in 25,000 parents and grandparents in 2012, 43 per cent above its 2011 level. Meanwhile, fewer refugees, nannies and people applying to stay on humanitarian grounds will be admitted.

By cutting new applications and increasing intake, Kenney said he hopes to reduce the current backlog of 165,000 parents and grandparents by half in two years.

To relieve the pain of immigrants separated from their older relatives, Citizenship and Immigration Canada will start issuing the new Parent and Grandparent Super Visa on Dec. 1, which will allow members of that group to visit their families in Canada on a temporary basis for up to two years.

The visa — which Kenney said will take only eight weeks to process — will allow holders to make multiple entries over a span of 10 years. But there is a catch: Elderly visitors must obtain private Canadian health-care insurance during their stay here. And applicants must still meet the minimum income requirement to apply.

“So many families say to me they don’t necessarily want moms and dads or grandparents to immigrate permanently to Canada,” Kenney told a news conference in Mississauga.

“They just want them to be able to come and stay for an extended period, to help care for their kids when they are young and also be able to go back home, where they are well settled with other families and friends.”

Kenney said he is confident Canadian visa posts have the resources to handle the anticipated influx of applications for the super visas and the enhanced targets for sponsorships.

While the super visas are welcomed, critics say the mandatory medical insurance will create an instant barrier for many families, favouring those who are well-off.

“This requirement will create a two-tier access to our immigration system. We have argued that there’s no research or experimental evidence that parents and grandparents of new Canadians are an undue burden on our social and medical systems,” said Debbie Douglas, of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants.

The government plans to hold consultations next year on how to redesign the parents and grandparents program to avoid future large backlogs when it takes in new applications in 2014.

On Friday, the immigration department also belatedly released the breakdown of the number of immigrants it plans to accept in various immigration streams. In its annual report tabled Tuesday, Ottawa had only said categorically that it would maintain the same immigration level.

In 2012, the government plans to take in 157,000 economic migrants, down 3 per cent from this year, with the quota allotted for live-in caregivers-turned-permanent residents slashed by almost half to 9,000.

Canada will also take in 10 per cent fewer refugees — from 29,000 in 2011 to 26,000 in 2012. Spots assigned to people allowed to stay in Canada on humanitarian grounds will be down by 14 per cent to 7,900.

The only category that will see an increase in 2012 is family reunifications, up from 65,500 to 69,000, though the quota for spouses and children will be reduced from 48,000 to 44,000.

Immigration Minister hits pause on family reunification applications

JOHN IBBITSON

Ottawa— Globe and Mail Update

Jason Kenney is walking a fine political line: seeking to slim a bloated immigration backlog without jeopardizing his Conservative government’s support among new Canadians – many of whom voted Conservative in the last election.

That careful balancing act was on display Friday when the Citizenship and Immigration Minister placed a two-year moratorium on applications from parents and grandparents seeking to reunite with family members in Canada.

The freeze is intended to thin afamily-reunification backlog that could soon produce wait times of up to ten years.

But to counter concerns that Mr. Kenney is trying to curtail family reunification, the Conservative government introduced a new and generous visa for parents and grandparents who want to stay with their family in Canada.

“We understand how important it is for Canadians, including new Canadians, to live with their loved ones,” Mr. Kenney declared at a news conference Friday.

But “we need to change the math.”

About 6 per cent of all immigrants to Canada are parents and grandparents of existing immigrants. But family-unification applications have far outstripped available spaces, creating a backlog of 165,000 applicants and wait times of seven years, which will lengthen to 10 years by 2018 if there are no changes.

“That is why it is absolutely essential that we bring in a temporary pause on applications,” Mr. Kenney said.

The moratorium is expected to reduce the backlog to about 50,000, while the government seeks to craft a new application process that matches the number of people who are allowed to apply to spaces available. In the meantime, the quota for parental and grandparental admissions will increase by 60 per cent, to 25,000 admissions a year, to further clear the backlog.

For those who waiting to immigrate or to get on the list, the new 10-year visa will allow parents and grandparents to stay for as long as two years at a stretch. However they must, if required, take a medical exam first; they must purchase private medical insurance while in Canada, and their children or grandchildren must be able to demonstrate that they can support the visiting relative.

Don Davies, NDP immigration critic, welcomed the new visa and the increased intake of parents and grandparents. But he added that the best way to overcome all of the backlogs in the immigration system would be to increase the intake from about 250,000 a year to about 330,000, or 1 per cent of the population.

“We’re not saying this for compassionate, fuzzy-wuzzy, lefty” reasons, Mr. Davies said. Increasing immigration levels are necessary to meet future labour shortages brought on by an aging society, he maintained.

Friday’s announcement caps a week of new initiatives by the Conservative government that focus on increasing the number of highly skilled and highly educated immigrants coming to Canada.

Overall, however, family-class immigrants continue to make up about 65 per cent of all applicants.