Efforts to keep bogus Roma refugees out have failed: Jason Kenney

Sarah Boesveld

Jason Kenney, the Citizenship and Immigration Minister, says the government has tried but so far failed to stem the tide of Roma coming into Canada and abusing its refugee system.

The Immigration and Refugee Board receives approximately 400 claims from Hungary every month, the vast majority of whom are believed to be Roma. A record number arrived in Toronto in October — 91 asylum-seekers landing in a single day on Oct. 26, according to data from the Canada Border Services Agency.

About 40% of refugee claimants from Hungary are coming from a city called Miskolc, about four hours outside of Budapest, Mr. Kenney said, a region the government has targeted with fruitless information campaigns.

“We tried to circulate brochures explaining ‘This is not the way you immigrate to Canada,’ and it’s had no impact,” he said, adding that the flood of asylum-seekers is “highly organized” and not at all spontaneous.

More worrisome is the evidence of human trafficking involved in these cases, Mr. Kenney added.

Earlier this month, a court in a Hamilton, Ont., sentenced the kingpin of a Hungarian human smuggling ring to nine years in prison. Ferenec Domotor, 49, had brought Hungarians to Canada, trained them on how to file for welfare, and made them work and live in squalid conditions while he kept their social assistance for himself.

Canada’s ambassador to Hungary, Tamara Guttman, visited Miskolc and another northern city called Eger to find out why 1,600 Hungarians claimed refugee status in Canada in the first half of 2011, Hungarian media reported in December.

Last year, Hungary had the greatest number of refugee claimants, with 4,423 applying for that status in Canada. A year earlier the figure was just 2,296.

‘Almost none of these European asylum claimants even show up for their hearings … but they all do show up in Ontario’s welfare program’

The government hopes to push through refugee reform Bill C-31 before the House breaks for the summer, making way for a “new and faster asylum system this fall,” ideally by October, Mr. Kenney said in an interview last week.

If that bill passes, the immigration system would move bona fide refugees through to permanent residency in the span of months rather than years, and it would make it easier and quicker for the government to identify and weed out false refugee claimants.

“Almost none of these European asylum claimants even show up for their hearings — they just overwhelmingly abandon them and withdraw their own claims,” Mr. Kenney said. “But they all do show up in Ontario’s welfare program.”

The government will create a list of “safe” democratic countries with independent judiciaries and who have signed on to international human rights laws and conventions — countries where residents should not be facing persecution.

Those claimants will have an expedited hearing, and they won’t have access to various appeals, he said.

“I would anticipate that when we pull the switch on the new system this fall, we will have the initial list of designated countries in place,” he said. “I would certainly anticipate that it would include those European countries that are the primary source of false asylum claims.”

China, Colombia, Pakistan, Namibia, Mexico, Nigeria, Saint Vincent, Sri Lanka and India rounded out the Immigration and Refugee Board’s list of top 10 source countries of refugee claimants.

In 2009, Stephen Harper’s government introduced visa requirements on visitors from Mexico and the Czech Republic, slowing the flow of refugee claimants from those countries to a trickle.

Between 2007 and 2009, Czech nationals, the majority of Roma origin, filed 3,000 refugee claims, compared with fewer than five in 2006.

National Post, with files from Postmedia News

Feds create new immigration program to get skilled tradespeople to Canada

CALGARY — Ottawa has announced a new immigration program that it says will make it easier for Canadian business to hire the workers most urgently needed _ skilled tradespeople.

The new stream for workers in fields such as construction and manufacturing should be set up later this year, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said Tuesday in Calgary, the financial heart of Canada's oil and gas industry and a city all too familiar with skilled labour shortages.

``In Canada we've been welcoming historic high numbers of immigrants, partly to help us fuel our prosperity in the future and fill growing labour shortages,'' Kenney said at the construction site of The Bow, a 58-storey downtown skyscraper that's close to completion.

``But, to be honest, our immigration programs haven't been effective in addressing a lot of those shortages. Our immigration programs have become rigid and slow and passive.''

The labour market in the West is especially tight, thanks in large part to a bevy of multibillion-dollar oilsands projects on the go in northern Alberta. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers forecasts the energy industry will spend some $55 billion this year on major projects, said spokesman Travis Davies.

The Petroleum Human Resources Council of Canada said in a recent report the oilsands sector will need 21,000 additional workers by 2021 _ more than double the number it employed in 2011 _ to compensate for both the gap left by retiring baby boomers and fill the needs of new projects. And that doesn't account for turnover in an ultra-competitive labour market.

It also doesn't include the ripple effects of that growth on the wider economy _ like the need for new homes and offices to be constructed, or demand for more service industry staffers.

There are some avenues for newcomers to become permanent residents, like the Provincial Nominee Program and the Canadian Experience Class. Kenney said those have been helpful, but insufficient.

``There are still huge gaps. We're talking about tens if not hundreds of thousands of shortages in the skilled trades predicted in the next decade alone.''

Skilled tradespeople make up a small percentage of immigrants coming to Canada under the current program, even though the resource and construction sectors are clamouring for welders, pipefitters, electricians and other skilled trades.

Criteria required to enter Canada under the existing program put tradespeople at a disadvantage because the rules are geared toward professionals, said Kenney.

``Let's be honest _ we don't need more people coming to Canada with advanced degrees that end up driving taxi cabs and end up working in convenience stores. That's a waste of human capital,'' he said.

Businesses know better than the government what sorts of skills are needed and should have the flexibility to head- hunt workers overseas or even just south of the border where unemployment is high and the skillsets are a good fit for Canada, he added.

``Frankly, we've been selecting a lot of people through our skilled worker program who end up unemployed and underemployed while businesses have skill shortages,'' Kenney said.

Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, said the new program is an improvement from the tendency to use temporary foreign workers to back-stop labour shortages.

But he said he remains ``deeply troubled'' that there are some 1.5 million unemployed workers within Canada that could fill the gap if they had the right training.

``There's a gap that needs to be bridged between the demand for workers in areas like the oilsands and the supply of workers in places like Ontario and Quebec,'' said McGowan.

``Instead of abandoning those unemployed workers, we feel very strongly that our government should look first at new and creative ways to train unemployed Canadians to fill the job vacancies as opposed to reverting to what I would describe as a short-sighted Band-Aid solution like the one they've announced today.''

Cheryl Knight, CEO of the Petroleum HR Council, agrees more training and better outreach to students is needed, but she said that's not enough to fill the gap.

``The bottom line message is that we also need foreign workers, skilled foreign workers.''

The measures to bring more skilled tradespeople into Canada is welcome, but there is also a shortage of skilled workers that fit into neither the trades nor professional categories.

For instance, workers with experience in drilling complicated horizontal natural gas or oil wells won't necessarily have educational credentials. But they'll have plenty of valuable experience they learned on the job, Knight said.

Davies, the CAPP spokesman, said skilled tradespeople are badly needed in the oilpatch, but there are shortages in the engineering and financial industries, too.

``When you look out there, the labour challenge is very real and it's very imminent. And it's not just oil and gas. It's all industries in this country, and especially in the West,'' Davies said.

The oil and gas industry believes in hiring Canadians first, and supports training and apprenticeship programs, he added.

``We also think we're going to have to look beyond our own borders and take some steps to increase economic immigrants to our country,'' he said.

The changes are part of a broader set of immigration reforms laid out in last month's federal budget.

Alberta government officials consulted with Kenney in the days leading up to the federal budget, said Premier Alison Redford.

``And what we saw was some real flexibility in terms of trying to create labour strategies that could compliment immigration policy, that would allow us to get more workers here faster,'' she told reporters while campaigning in Calgary ahead of the April 23 provincial election.

``So I'm very pleased to see some success with respect to that.''