Immigration Canada

Canada opens borders to Irish with new visa rules to boost recruitment

Saint Patrick's Day, San Franciso (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Canadian employers in Dublin to recruit employees
By PATRICK COUNIHAN, IrishCentral Staff Writer

Canada is to double the number of working holiday visas available to young Irish people.

The Canadian authorities will also allow Irish visa holders to double their length of stay from one year to two.

A new agreement between the Irish and Canadian governments was outlined in Dublin ahead of the Working Abroad Expo in the RDS.

Irish Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore and Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney signed the new agreement.

It means the number of working holiday visas for Canada available to young Irish people will double and the length of stay will extended from one year to two.

A total of 6,350 visas will be available in 2013, up from 5,350 this year. The figure will rise to 10,700 in 2014.

Minister Kenney is in Ireland to support four Canadian delegations of government officials, recruiters and companies keen to hire Irish workers at the Working Abroad Expo.
The Irish Times reports that Kenney is the first Canadian minister to travel abroad to recruit foreign workers in over 40 years.

Minister Kenney said: “Employers are coming here because they see highly educated, mobile, English-speaking young people, many of whom are underemployed, who could walk straight into jobs in Canada with no gap in terms of their education and training.”
He outlined how the quota of International Experience Canada (IEC) visas, which allow Irish passport holders aged 18 to 35 to work legally in the country for up to 12 months, was filled by 30th May this year, three months earlier than the quota of 5,000 was filled in 2011.

The paper also says that the number of IEC visas allocated to Irish people has increased dramatically in the last two years, up from 4,229 in 2010 and 2,500 in 2009.

Kenney said: “The IEC programme started out as a cultural exchange between the two countries, but has become increasingly work focused in recent years as the Irish recession worsened and Canadian employers looked to Ireland to fill labour shortages.

“The most acute labour shortages are in skilled trades, particularly construction trades like carpenters, welders, boiler makers and equipment operators.”

The Minister there are also significant vacancies in mining, healthcare, the service industry and IT, with a shortage of more than 2,000 IT professionals in Ontario alone.

He added that the western provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba and British Columbia offer the most employment opportunities for Irish people.

The majority of the 70 exhibitors at the Working Abroad Expo this weekend are Canadian as they look to fill more than 1,000 vacancies.

The Minister continued: “The extension of the work permit period to two years will enable Irish people to find better jobs that suited their skill levels, by reassuring employers that workers would be in the country for a longer period of time.

“The two-year period will also make it easier for Irish people to apply for permanent residency in Canada, by giving them a longer amount of time to work in skilled employment, which is necessary in order to apply.”

The Irish Times reports that Deputy Prime Minister Mr Gilmore outlined that his Government’s ‘primary priority’ to create jobs and an economic climate in Ireland that would allow emigrants to return, but that the visa programme was ‘not just about short-term emigration’.

Gilmore said: “Canada is one of the biggest investors in Ireland, and Irish companies now employ 60,000 people in Canada.”

Read more: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/-Canada-opens-borders-to-Irish-with-new-visa-rules-to-boost-recruitment-172953331.html#ixzz28cJ7mwzG

New immigrant? Meet small business

York University Observatory, Toronto (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

WALLACE IMMEN
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Oct. 04 2012, 7:00 PM EDT

Andrey Bolgov assumed he would be a desirable candidate for a job with a big Canadian company when he immigrated to Canada in 2009.

But despite having an MBA in marketing from a German university, fluency in several languages and seven years of experience in marketing and finance for companies in Germany, Italy and Belgium, he got no response to the résumés he sent to potential employers.

By the spring of 2010, he was reaching a dead end. “I didn’t know who else to apply to and I didn’t have any networking contacts to refer me to potential jobs,” the Russian native recalled.

At that time, York University in Toronto was launching a bridging program for internationally educated professionals that was putting an emphasis on the hiring needs of smaller employers.

Mr. Bolgov took courses over the next six months that helped him understand ways in which Canadian companies operate differently than foreign companies for which he had worked.

And, more importantly, a lead he got through contacts in the program led to his job as international marketing specialist for Maplesoft Inc., a technology services company based in Waterloo, Ont., which has 135 employees.

“I would not have known that they were a company to approach for a job,” he said, “but it turned out they were looking for someone just like me [to sell Maplesoft’s services overseas].”

Programs to help newcomers enter the job market aren’t new, but the program at York is specifically focused on encouraging small businesses to hire new Canadians.

“In the past, small- and medium-sized businesses haven’t tended to focus on recruiting foreign educated talent, in large part because most don’t have human resources departments to vet foreign credentials and experience,” explained Nora Priestly, program manager of York University’s bridging program for internationally educated professionals.

York is offering to provide those services. “Bridging programs can validate foreign credentials and provide assessment and training in English and the Canadian way of doing business,” Ms. Priestly said.

With financing from the Ontario government, English-language, professional writing and business courses are included at no costs to the students after an initial $90 registration fee. Courses typically cover two semesters, but students can add specialized skills and certification programs that have tuition fees of up to $7,000 (the university has a bursary program to cover as much as $3,500 of those costs).

The 300 foreign-trained professionals who have taken York’s program in the past two years came from 40 countries with dozens of first languages, though most participants are multilingual. More than half have advanced university degrees and several years of professional experience abroad.

Newcomers “tend to start their job search with big employers that their friends have heard about. That means they miss out on openings at smaller organizations that could use their talents,” Ms. Priestly noted.

Because immigrant-skills programs traditionally tend to get their initial support from large corporations, they were less known by small and medium-sized companies.

So another immigrant employment program in the Greater Toronto Area is doing a grassroots outreach to groom foreign-trained candidates to meet the needs of smaller companies.

“We have 20 outreach representatives who visit smaller organizations to learn their hiring needs, and are marketing foreign-trained professionals in our program to them as candidates,” said Allison Pond, executive director of Accessible Community Counselling and Employment Services. The not-for-profit organization is supported by government, corporate and United Way funding.

The ACCES program financed by government and corporate grants provides specific training for newcomers and helps obtain certifications required to qualify for jobs. It also arranges training with coaches who can provide mentoring as the newly hired enter the work force, Ms. Pond said.

A third initiative aims and both small and large business managers’ misconceptions that make it difficult for new Canadians to adapt to the workplace.

“We’re trying to steer people away from stereotypes,” said Rose DeVeyra, learning initiatives manager for the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, which has developed a series of videos and workbooks it calls “TRIEC Campus.”

Because owners of small businesses usually don’t have much free time, the program is comprised of a series of free, short modules on topics such as how interviewing techniques, résumé screening and communication can create misunderstandings and how to get around them.

“It’s not a ‘do this, and don’t do that,’” Ms. DeVerya said. The worksheets and videos also explain why approaches and work styles may be different in other cultures.

The course can also be used by trainers and human resource managers to demonstrate the challenges faced by immigrants, she said. There are also self-study guides for newcomers about how Canadian workplaces operate.

Mr. Bolgov learned about some of those differences in his courses at York University.

One revelation, he said, was that his résumé might have confused hiring managers: “In Europe listing the companies that you worked for – that is most important. In Canada, they are most interested in knowing the results of your previous work,” he found. he needed to be more direct in meetings. “In Europe, the first meeting you have with someone is less about facts and more about their family and things you have in common. Only after I had a good idea of the person would I start in to sell them on my idea,” he explained.

“In Canada, it’s better to make your point right away – and then you can build up a relationship from there.”

Ontario needs an immigration strategy to attract skilled new Canadians

Deutsch: Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There was a time when Ontario didn’t have to do much of anything to attract immigrants from around the world. People knew they could come here, get well-paying jobs in factories, even if they spoke little English, and fairly quickly make a better life for themselves and their families.

Not anymore. Ontario’s economy has shifted and needs more skilled people in our workforce. At the same time, other provinces have realized the immense value of skilled immigrants and are now actively luring them to the west and east of us.

Ontario still gets the largest number of annual immigrants — 99,000 last year — but our overall share has dropped almost one-third over the past decade.

As a nation, it’s a very good thing that immigrants are finding opportunity and welcoming communities in cities and towns right across the country. Newcomers shouldn’t be confined to Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. But as a province, Ontario can’t sit back and do nothing in what is becoming an increasingly tough competition to attract talented immigrants who can help drive economic prosperity.

Ontario must become more attractive to skilled immigrants or we’ll face large-scale shortages of workers in the coming years because of our rapidly aging population. Indeed, an expert panel has just concluded that Ontario needs to attract 135,000 immigrants each year. And the bulk of them, about 70 per cent, should be coming from the skilled class of immigrants, who tend to be better educated and have an easier time finding employment than those sponsored by families or refugee claimants.

Ontario has seen those kinds of numbers as recently as 2005, but getting back to that level won’t be easy at a time when many of the skilled immigrants who do come here are frustrated in their efforts to get work in their chosen fields and are relegated to low-paying jobs.

That’s why most of the expert panel’s recommendations have to do with ensuring a better fit between the skill-set of immigrants and workforce needs. To do that, Ontario needs to renew — and dramatically improve — its partnership with the federal government.

As the panel points out, Ottawa’s federal skilled worker program — the main source of the province’s economic immigrants — is not delivering the kind of newcomers Ontario needs. Its reliance on a list of priority occupations makes it “too static to respond to the realities and dynamics of Ontario’s labour market.”

While Ottawa is failing to bring enough skilled immigrants to Ontario, it limits the province’s ability to select its own immigrants by capping the provincial nominee program at 1,000. That must also change.

Ontario’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister Charles Sousa says he will use the report’s recommendations to help develop the province’s “first-ever” immigration strategy.

That we don’t have such a strategy already shows how complacent Ontario has been. The time for that is over. Ontario must do more to earn the best and brightest new Canadians.

Source: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/1267479--ontario-needs-an-immigration-strategy-to-attract-skilled-new-canadians

Canada to Lebanese: No More Free Pass

English: Oath of citizenship ceremony (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Canadian government has begun the process of cracking down on passport holders who have claimed citizenship through falsely alleging residence in the country.

Many Lebanese citizens feel that they are in need of a second nationality, a safety net of sorts, given their country’s explosive history. They think of Fairouz’s song A Little House in Canada when they eat out-of-date food, or can’t find proper housing.

The song captured the sentiment of Canada as a haven and refuge for those looking to escape their troubled land.

Canada has become the top destination for those seeking a back-up citizenship after it opened its doors to immigrants from around the world.

The image of Canada provides peace of mind for immigrants who want to live without fretting about education, healthcare, housing, and retirement.

These are some of the many reasons why Lebanese have devised all sorts of ways to get their name on a Canadian passport. Often this involves a little trickery, whereby the person in question – through friends that reside there – fabricates the necessary paperwork that makes it appear as if he or she is employed and residing in Canada – paying rent, phone bills and taxes.

Jason Kenney declared that his government “will begin revoking the citizenships of thousands of naturalized citizens who are believed to have claimed to be in the country when, in fact, they were abroad.Perhaps Canada brought this upon itself by not stamping the passports of exiting travellers, as many countries do. On the Lebanese side, one has the option of stamping their entry and exit on a separate piece of paper. Thus a Lebanese can visit Canada and return home without any trace of them having departed the former.
It is surprising that the Canadian authorities overlooked this scheme for so many years. Only now are they beginning to take measures to crack down after minister of immigration Jason Kenney declared that his government “will begin revoking the citizenships of thousands of naturalized citizens who are believed to have claimed to be in the country when, in fact, they were abroad.”

“We estimate that up to 3,100 Canadian citizens may have acquired their citizenship through deception. Therefore, we will begin the process of withdrawing it from them.”

These measures will not only involve Lebanese, according to the minister, for there are “11,000 people from 100 countries who are implicated in deceiving the authorities,” adding that, “the Canadian government has learned that thousands were residing outside the country, paying intermediaries up to $25,000, in some cases, to make it appear that they are living in Canada.”

According to the spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), Nancy Caron, “the department of immigration only started using international file management system technology in 2004, which has helped us expose suspicious activity and deception.”

She added that the government campaign will not only involve revoking any violator’s citizenship, their case will also be referred to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) for further action against the accused and those who abetted them.

“There is no time limit to our investigation and we intend to remove citizenship from all those involved,” she warned.

Caron explained that the problem “is international, and the cases we have before us includes up to 100 nationalities, most of whom live outside Canada. We suspect that that around 11,000 people may have lied, when they applied for citizenship or permanent residency, and we have already initiated action against 530 of them,” adding that “there may be up to 5,000 permanent residents who have forged their applications that we are in the process of investigating further.”

She noted that her agency has “devised new citizenship questions which will help expose those who may be trying to mislead the authorities.”

According to Stephen Handfield, a lawyer who specializes in immigration, the current Canadian government is taking a hard line on immigrants in accordance with the politics of the ruling Conservative Party.

It is worth noting that Canadian law stipulates that those seeking citizenship must reside in the country for at least three consecutive years before applying.

Abiding by the Law

Many Lebanese are indeed concerned about the new measures being taken by the Canadian government, but they insist that they will abide by the law.

Nada, for example, decided to move to Canada in order to get her citizenship there. She says that the whole process – including plane tickets, everyday costs, and fake bills – has cost her around $20,000.

She’s not too worried about the citizenship exam. She does, however, face some obstacles such as coming up with report cards and doctors’ bill, as was requested of some of her friends during the examination.

Her main concern is the future of her children who are already Canadian citizens due to the fact that they were born there.

the whole process – including plane tickets, everyday costs, and fake bills – cost around $20,000.Nada is just one among the many Lebanese who are seeking Canadian citizenship but not necessarily to live there.
They will be have to be more careful than in the past now that the Canadian government has adopted more restrictive measures which obligate them to reside in the country.

This article is an edited translation from the Arabic Edition.
http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/12821

Kenney announces upgrades to program aimed at attracting world's talent

Permanent Resident Card (2002-2007) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

STEVEN CHASE
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail

Canada has just welcomed its 20,000th permanent resident under a four-year-old immigration program that’s on track to become this country’s premier method for recruiting newcomers.

The Canadian Experience Class, launched only a few years ago, represents the future of Canada’s immigration system – one where the Harper government puts a hard-nosed emphasis on attracting the best and brightest skilled workers.

The program targets temporary foreign workers already in Canada and non-Canadians who have graduated from universities and colleges here – people who have proven they can integrate into society and meet labour market needs.

It removes immigration obstacles for a class of individuals that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney calls "the most likely to succeed."

The 20,000th permanent resident admitted through the four-year-old program is Gaurav Gore, originally from India.

He earned a master’s in business administration from the Unversity of Toronto, a program he began in 2008, and is applying his learning as a consultant with a major bank in Canada’s largest city.

Each year about 300,000 people such as Mr. Gore arrive in Canada. About 100,000 students and 200,000 temporary workers flood into this country annually – a group the Conservatives feel offers the best prospects for new immigrants.

“Mr. Gore completed a challenging, competitive university program,” Mr. Kenney said in a statement Friday. “He is now building a successful career, contributing to our economy and helping create jobs for Canadians here in Canada. Gaurav is exactly the sort of skilled worker that Canada hopes to attract and retain.”

The program fast tracks permanent residency applications for skilled foreign workers and graduate students who have spent time in Canada on temporary permits or student visas – those who can demonstrate they are proficient in either English or French.

Before it was created, highly-skilled outsiders could not become permanent residents from within Canada. Would-be applicants such as Mr. Gore would previously be told they had to return to their country of origin and wait at the back of a queue for about seven or eight years.

Under the new program, applicants can apply from within Canada and expect a quicker decision, normally within one year.

This type of economic immigrant class, unveiled three years ago, was the first new avenue to obtaining a permanent residency card in decades.

Upgrades to the program, announced by Mr. Kenney Friday, will make it easier for applicants to qualify for entry under the Canadian Experience Class.

All applicants will now require 12 months of Canadian work experience gained in the three years prior to their application. Previously, some needed 24 months experience.

This change will make it easier for international student graduates to apply for permanent residency under the program.

Canada was forced to bring in the new program because of a global race for talent with rival destinations such as Australia and the United Kingdom, which had similar programs.

The coming storm: 9 million retiring Baby Boomers in Canada

The Baby Boomers’ 50th birthday 3 (Photo credit: Christchurch City Libraries)

Jonathan Chevreau, Financial Post · Jul. 14, 2011 | Last Updated: Jul. 20, 2011 7:23 AM ET

Perhaps it’s just as well Baby Boomers enjoyed a taste of retirement when they tuned in and dropped out in the 1960s. Most have been working ever since and — apart from the exceptions who enjoy spectacular entrepreneurial success — seem fated to work well into old age.

A Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce poll this week found only half of Canadian Boomers aged 45 to 64 have regular savings programs in place. And a TD Waterhouse survey found 31% of retirees aged 55 to 70 are spending more in retirement than expected.

Those who neither save nor have old-fashioned employer-provided defined-benefit pensions seem destined to toil at least until the traditional retirement age of 65. Many may opt for 70, since by waiting the extra five years, annual benefits paid out by the Canada Pension Plan will be 42% higher.

That’s assuming you can even find a place to toil in this depressingly stagnant economy. There’s an emerging trend called “unretirement,” as practised by — here’s a term you may not yet have encountered — “workampers.” That’s a contraction of “work camping,” which refers to an increasingly popular practice whereby aging Baby Boomers sell their principal residences and hit the road, often in recreational vehicles.

Couples or families travel across America and work a few days or weeks at or near minimum wage and/or exchange their labour for a place to stay (or a place to park the RV), according to Steve Anderson, president of Arkansas-based Possibilities Workamper News.

For Workampers, home is where the RV is and the RV is parked wherever they can generate short-term cash. Jobs include gigs at parks, fisheries, amusement parks, hotels and even high-tech giants like Amazon.com.

It seems we’ve come full circle with a lifestyle similar to what the first wave of Boomers enjoyed in their youth, when they lived in communes or rainbow-coloured minibuses in the psychedelic ’60s. For movie buffs, this may conjure up Jack Nicholson’s About Schmidt, where the veteran actor plays a widowed retired actuary who hits the road in a Winnebago.

Actuaries are shrewd about pensions and retirement, which is why we’re hearing from a lot of them in the current round of pension reform debates. The focus is on impecunious Baby Boomers, judging by a 2010 Liberal white paper entitled Canadian Pension Security, Adequacy and Coverage: Public Policy Challenges and the Baby Boom Generation.

“The undeniable fact is that, over the next 20 to 30 years, Canadian pension regimes will face a perfect storm of an aging population and longer life spans,” it says.

The storm analogy is not misplaced. Many Boomers have failed to batten down the hatches in anticipation of the coming 3-D hurricane of demographics, debt and deficit. The term 3-D hurricane has been popularized by Research Affiliates’ chief investment officer, Jason Hsu. He says the ‘new normal’ is an extended period of lower economic and return expectations for the aging and debt-ridden developed world.

The height of the Boomer retirement cycle in the United States will be 2025, Hsu says, at which point there will be 10 new retirees for each new entrant to the workforce. In 1970, the ratio was closer to 5 to 1.

Boomers should have anticipated these untenable support ratios looming in their old age and saved aggressively in their working years by delaying pre-retirement consumption. But of course, “what we observe today is inadequate retirement savings.”

Hsu frets there are not enough young workers to keep pay-as-you-go Social Security (in the United States) afloat. Employer pensions and forced retirement savings should have protected workers from the demographics of aging but employers have been dismantling DB pensions while Boomers have not embraced voluntary savings as much as they should have.

As we’ve seen in France, Greece and other countries, these tensions are spilling over.

“Serious problems arise when countries have become so indebted that they are unable to raise debt to bail out retirees who have, by and large, undersaved.”

Canada is twice blessed in having largely dodged the 2008-2009 financial crisis and in the fact the CPP was put on a firm footing in the 1990s. While partly pay-as-you-go, CPP is strong enough that in the recent election, the NDP and the Liberal Party both advocated expanding it.

However, the ruling Conservatives are not committed to a “big CPP” beyond perhaps a “modest” enhancement of the system. In an interview this week with Ted Menzies, the Minister of State (Finance), I could get no precise definition of “modest” except that it’s well below the doubling of CPP benefits some have called for.

In a recent article in this paper, the Fraser Institute’s Neil Mohindra warned against using a battering ram to swat a fly. Once interest rates move back to their higher historical levels, he believes Canadians will be able to save more, borrow less and buy annuities with much better payouts.

Still, there’s little doubt the self-employed and workers in small businesses need help setting up employer pensions resembling those enjoyed by employees in large corporations and government.

True to their roots, the Conservatives prefer a private-sector, market-oriented defined-contribution pension model that will be managed by the nation’s banks, fund companies and insurance companies. It’s called pooled retirement pension plan, or PRPP.

With a four-year electoral mandate, the Harper administration has plenty of time to implement this program and prove it’s serious about closing the retirement income gap. Whether the PRPP arrives in time to save the Boomers remains to be seen. Until then, my general advice to them is: “Don’t quit your day job.”

Immigration Canada

Canada opens borders to Irish with new visa rules to boost recruitment

New immigrant? Meet small business

Ontario needs an immigration strategy to attract skilled new Canadians

Canada to Lebanese: No More Free Pass

Kenney announces upgrades to program aimed at attracting world's talent

The coming storm: 9 million retiring Baby Boomers in Canada

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