Canada opens new visa application center in Lima

• Lima, Aug. 16 (ANDINA). Canada has signed an agreement to open a Visa Application Centre (VAC) in Lima on August 19th in order to make the visa application process easier for applicants in Peru.All applicants for temporary resident visas, including visitors, students and temporary workers, and all permanent residents applying for travel documents to return to Canada are encouraged to present their applications at the VAC as of August 19th and take advantage of the extended office hours and of the on site client service.
  The VAC is only responsible for distributing information on relevant visa requirements, as published by the Embassy of Canada; receiving applications and supporting documents; and reviewing applications to ensure completeness.
  
  In addition it is responsible for securely forwarding applications to the visa office in Lima; returning, by secure means, the passport and decision to the applicant, reported LivinginPeru.com.
  The VAC is authorized by Citizenship and Immigration Canada to receive applications. However, if you choose not to bring your application to the VAC, you may apply directly at the Embassy.
  VAC's office will be located at Dos de Mayo 516 Tower A Office 403 in Miraflores and will operate Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 pm.

Finance Minister: ‘Canada’s rapidly aging workforce’ an urgent problem now

BY THADDEUS BAKLINSKI

• Mon Aug 15, 2011 15:50 EST
• Comments (17)

Conservative finance minister Jim Flaherty.

OTTAWA, August 15, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told a group of policy consultants at a meeting in Wakefield, Que. last week that “Canada’s rapidly aging workforce” is a problem that is beginning to impact the federal government now, and cannot be relegated to the backburner to be dealt with sometime in the future.

Flaherty observed that despite great concern over recent economic crises and the current stock market fluctuations, “The need to address current challenges must not keep us from tackling the key questions that affect our future prosperity.”

These “key questions” include rising health care costs from an aging population compounded by fewer working-age taxpayers to foot the bill.

Flaherty’s concern is backed up by a draft report, titled “Canada’s Changing Demographics: The Impacts of Population Aging,” on the impacts of Canada’s aging population that was unveiled to government deputy ministers last November by Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters. It confirms that the demographic impact of an aging population, low birth rate, and a declining pool of younger taxpayers, is being felt now.

“The oldest baby boomers start to turn 65 in 2011, meaning the dependency ratio will start to increase significantly in a matter of months,” states the report, which The Globe and Mail obtained in redacted form under Access to Information.

“A Canada where seniors outnumber children is uncharted territory,” the report states, and offers proposals such as incentives to boost fertility rates, coaxing younger immigrants to come to Canada, and encouraging Canadians to work longer.

In May 2010, the Demography Division of Statistics Canada predicted that the number of seniors will surpass the number of children aged 14 or under for the first time ever sometime between 2015 and 2021.

The population projections for 2009 to 2036 found that Canada’s population will age rapidly until 2031, by which time the entire baby boom generation will have turned 65. Thereafter it would continue aging, but at a less rapid pace.

“Projections show that seniors would account for between 23% and 25% of the total population by 2036, nearly double the 13.9% in 2009. Higher immigration levels would do little to change the forthcoming aging of the Canadian population,” the report stated.

In February 2010 Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page released one of the first official reportsthat addressed the disastrous consequences of Canada’s long-term below replacement birth rate.

Canada’s steady 1.5 birth rate, far below the 2.1 replacement rate, along with the accompanying aging of the population will result in “a major demographic transition,” that could have devastating financial results, the report warned.

“The Government’s current fiscal structure is not sustainable over the long term,” said the report. In order to compensate for the low birth rate the report said there must be very substantial increases in taxation and major cuts to government services, amounting to $14-28 billion.

But according to demographer Robert Sassone, PhD, the solution to demographic implosion and the resulting financial crisis is not immigration, higher taxes or raising the retirement age, but lies in increasing the fertility rate.

In response to the Page report, Dr. Sassone told LifeSiteNews last year that beyond making abortion illegal, “we must change the attitudes of people towards having babies.”

Analysis: What Canada’s debt crisis in the ’90s can and can’t teach the U.S.

Image via WikipediaBy Randall Palmer and John McCrank
OTTAWA/TORONTO — Canada has some lessons for the United States in terms of slashing deficits and winning top tier ratings back, but there are deep differences between the two countries in terms of what might work.
The Liberal government won broad political support for its efforts to cut the deficit in the decade after its first international ratings downgrade in 1992, but the United States faces deep political divisions about how to respond.
Ottawa’s chosen route back to surplus involved both spending cuts and tax hikes, in a ratio of roughly seven to one. The budget was balanced within six years, and Canada won its prized AAA rating back within a decade.
“You basically have to grasp the nettle,” Paul Martin, the finance minister at the time, told Reuters in an interview. “Fundamentally, you have to have an end game, you have to take immediate action.”
Martin, also a former prime minister, said he was confident the United States could balance its budget, but it would need tax hikes as well as spending cuts.
“The actions have to be primarily on cutting expenditures, but the fact is that you cannot do it unless everybody is willing to come to the party, and if you eliminate tax increases… you’re never going to make it.”
Tough advice also came from Monte Solberg, who was finance critic for the conservative opposition Reform Party during Martin’s deficit-cutting years.
In a display of inter-party co-operation that’s rare outside wartime, Reform backed the Liberals as they cut the deficit, ushering in an era where it became political suicide for a federal Canadian politician even to talk about running a deficit.
“If you don’t make the cuts now in things like some of the big entitlement programs, then those programs themselves will have to be cut much more deeply in the future and the pain will be much deeper,” Solberg, whose now-defunct Reform Party has small-government parallels with the U.S. Tea Party, said of the U.S. budget mess.
“So better do it now — it’s the old saying, you can’t dock the dog’s tail an inch at a time. You should just do the job, get it done, face up to the pain and in the end you’ll be better off.”
DEBT HEADACHE
Canada’s headaches with international rating agencies started in 1992 as first Standard & Poor’s and then Moody’s (in 1994) lowered its debt ratings, alarmed about rising public debt levels along with concern that a separatist movement in French-speaking Quebec could tear the country apart.
The Wall Street Journal rubbed salt in the wounds, with a January 1995 editorial that called Canada “an honorary member of the Third World.” With Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio heading for a record 72 percent, the moniker stung. The budget cuts were painful — health care was hit especially hard — but the political will never faltered.
“I think it’s interesting that in terms of the Canadian experience, the fiscal rebalancing was done by a Liberal government, so it shows that you don’t need to be on the far right of the political spectrum to get government cuts and fiscal rebalancing,” said Craig Alexander, chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, Canada’s second largest.
“Even though it didn’t fit with the government’s ideology it actually embarked on very serious fiscal tightening. They put together a long-term plan as to how they were going to rebalance the finances of the country and then they delivered and executed on that plan, and I think that’s the message for the United States.”
HARD TO COPY
But there are many reasons the Canadian model won’t work for Washington right now, including the political deadlock, the vast burden on U.S. government spending from the hard-to-cut military complex, and the fact that the overall world economy is in far more fragile shape than it was in the 1990s, when the United States also ran a budget surplus.
“We’re recovering from a global credit market meltdown, a Great Recession The U.S. has been at war for more than 10 years, so the economic fundamentals are far different, and so the accumulated deficits that the U.S. has on its balance sheet will be difficult to address by economic growth,” said Queen’s University finance professor Louis Gagnon.
“There doesn’t seem to be any clear line of sight towards a balanced budget. We’re seeing trillion-dollar deficits for almost as far at the eye can see.”
The U.S. budget deficit has soared to $1.4 trillion or 9 percent of GDP. Canada’s deficit never climbed above 6 percent of GDP, a more manageable number.
Moody’s Investor Services, whose 1995 second downgrade of Canada was often seen as the low point in the country’s budgetary problems, said Ottawa’s evangelistic approach to not running up a deficit had been a factor in the agency’s decision to give back the AAA rating in May 2002.
“We were convinced that the debt reduction program was going to continue over the medium term because there was a political consensus on that. We believed that no matter which major party was in power, that they would continue with that,” said Steven Hess, lead analyst for the United States and Canada at Moody’s.
“Just as a peculiarity, among the 16 countries that we have rated triple A, the U.S. is the only one that doesn’t have a parliamentary system. Now whether that’s good or bad is a subject for discussion, I’m not opining one way or the other, just pointing it out.”
© 2011 Thomson Reuters

Related articles

• U.S. downgrade spotlights Canada’s deficit-cutting plans (theglobeandmail.com)
• BMO cuts forecast for U.S. (windsorstar.com)
• Olive: U.S. will take a long time to dig out of this hole (thestar.com)
• Canada, our AAA nation (fullcomment.nationalpost.com)

Canada consultation on immigration

The Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney, recently paid homage to the role immigration has played in Canadian history, while also announcing future levels of immigration were under the spotlight.

In a speech last month at the Vancouver Board of Trade, Minister Kenney acknowledged:“Immigration has always been an important part of the Canadian story. It has been a sustaining feature of Canada’s history and continues to play an important role in building our country.”
The Immigration Minister then went on to announce that input was being sought from key stakeholders and members of the Canadian public to establish the correct level of immigration in the future: “Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) is in the middle of consulting with Canadians on… how many people we invite to immigrate to Canada, and who are they? We’re also looking for feedback on how we can better manage the system to make it more
efficient.”

The consultation process will involve discussions with settlement organisations, employers, industry bodies and community associations; there will also be online consultations. The main focus of the process is to determine: which immigration schemes CIC should focus on; how skilled migrants should be selected to fill shortages in the Canadian workforce; and how to reduce the time between skilled workers applying for and being granted visas.

One part of the current Canadian immigration system that looks set to continue into the future is the Provincial Nominee Programme (PNP). This programme was singled out for praise by Minister Kenney as a way of making immigration policy more responsive to labour market needs. The programme is a way Canada’s Provinces and Territories can react to the workforce needs they recognise in their areas.

“We intend to welcome a record number of provincial nominees this year,” Minister Kenney announced. “In 2011, we plan to admit about 40,000 immigrants in the provincial nominee category, five times more than the 8,000 welcomed in 2005. The previous high was 36,428 provincial nominees in 2010.”

The consultations the Minister is engaging in with stakeholders will continue across Canada and the Canadian government has promised to take into account the responses to the consultation when it sets future immigration policy.

 

CIC Announcement

The Government of Canada will not deal with non-authorized immigration representatives who charge for their services

The Government of Canada will not deal with non-authorized immigration representatives who charge for their services. Only the following people may charge a fee or receive any other type of consideration, to represent or advise you in connection with a Canadian immigration proceeding or application:
•lawyers and paralegals who are members in good standing of a Canadian provincial or territorial law society
•Notaries who are members in good standing of the Chambre des notaires du Québec, and
•Immigration consultants who are members in good standing of the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council