The Canadian economy added a surprising 61,000 jobs in September, all of it in full-time employment, Statistics Canada reported Friday.
The job growth helped push the country's unemployment rate down to 7.1 per cent, the lowest since December 2008.
Economists had been expecting 15,000 jobs to be added, and for the unemployment rate to remain steady at 7.3 per cent.
The country added 63,800 full-time jobs, but part-time employment slipped by 2,900.
But beyond the eye-popping headline number, the employment details "were much softer and more mixed in the report than the headline suggests on multiple counts," Scotiabank economist Derek Holt noted.
Many of the jobs came from public sector job growth, while the private sector lost almost 15,000 jobs. Self-employment rose by 38,900, "and we always treat this category with skepticism," Holt said. "Many self-employed jobs are vital contributions to a small-business based economy, but the volatility in this component and its tendency to report a pickup in self-reporting during soft spots in the economy make us doubtful that such a heavy role in lifting the headline is with substance."
And despite the job growth, the actual number of hours worked declined by 0.3 per cent. That's a troubling sign for GDP, since it's calculated based on the number of hours worked times the productivity of the labour force, Holt noted.
Statistics Canada said job increases were notable in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
The federal agency said job gains were spread across a number of industries, with educational services adding 38,000 positions with the start of the new school year.
The professional, scientific and technical services sector gained 36,000 jobs. Gains were also seen in accommodation and food services, natural resources, and public administration.
Employment fell by 35,000 in the finance, insurance, real estate and leasing sector, while manufacturing employment slipped by 24,000 for the month.
There are thousands of people in Canada waiting for their citizenship applications to be completed, and the Canada Employment Immigration Union says more workers are needed to clear the backlog.
Citizenship and Immigration recently contracted 86 temporary workers to help clear a backlog in citizenship applications at the Sydney, N.S. office. All applications from across Canada are processed there.
The average minimum wait is currently 19 months, up from 15 months in May. CIC says it plans to continue using temporary workers to clear the backlog, if it can find the money.
But the union says it is clear there is a need for more permanent workers at the office. Union spokeswoman Theresa MacInnis told CBC News Wednesday this is the third temporary contract some of these workers have been on since being laid off from permanent work a year and a half ago.
"To me it looks like there is a need for additional workers in the workplace," said MacInnis.
"Stabilizing a workforce is always a benefit for continuing work flows and processing."
MacInnis said the uncertainty has some workers looking for other jobs. She isn't sure what the turnover has been, but she said any training of new employees or people new to this processing wastes time and resources.
The latest contract for the 86 additional staff will expire at the end of March.
CIC expects workers will have processed at least 5,000 citizenship applications by that time. It's not known how much of a dent in the backlog that will make.
GATINEAU, QUE.—There’s no new marketing slogan, no new sales pitch to sell Canada to the world.
But tourism insiders say there was something just as important unveiled Thursday in Ottawa’s long-awaited strategy to woo the world — the promise of some coordination.
From setting airline policy to running national parks and writing the immigration rules, Ottawa has vast influence over an industry that pumps $73 billion a year into the economy and generates 594,500 jobs.
The new strategy sends the message that tourism is a priority for the 15 departments and agencies that have a hand in the industry, said Maxime Bernier, the minister of state for small business and tourism.
“It’s a new beginning for the federal government,” Bernier said Thursday after he unveiled the policy at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
“All the departments that have an influence on tourism, like transport department, Parks Canada . . . (will) now work together to ensure we are aligned with the same objectives,” Bernier said in an interview.
Industry executives applauded the move to put a spotlight on the tourism sector.
“It is an important announcement for us, not because it fits on a bumper sticker but because for the first time we have a thoughtful and deliberate roadmap,” said David Goldstein, president of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada.
He said few other industries can boost investment and employment across the nation.
“It’s just a great job driver. It’s one of the sectors where you can drive private sector jobs in every region of the country — urban centres, rural communities, even Canada’s North,” Goldstein said.
Some of the strategy’s goals seem modest — a new website, an annual report. It also highlights the need to enhance visa services and improve “border experiences” for arriving visitors.
But the promise to make tourism a focus across government departments was applauded as a good first step.
“It’s very important for us that we have a policy environment that is coordinated,” said Michele McKenzie, president of the Canadian Tourism Commission.
“We see countries that we compete against like Australia, New Zealand. They are world-class in terms of taking an all-of-government approach to tourism.”
Canada can have the “most brilliant marketers” but if would-be tourists have trouble getting a visa or a flight to be able to visit, “we’re going to lose those customers,” she said.
“We’re all competing against new and emerging and exotic destinations . . . This is a fiercely competitive world,” McKenzie said.
The move comes as Canada is trying to regain lost ground in the global battle for tourists. Part of the decline in international visitors is the drop-off in cross-border traffic by Americans deterred by a high Canadian dollar and the sagging economy in the United States.
That’s why Canada has set its sights on attracting more travellers from 11 key markets, including Australia, Brazil, India and Japan. An agreement signed with China last year giving Canada “approved destination status” has already boosted visitors by 24 per cent, Bernier said.
“That’s new visitors, new money, new jobs,” Bernier said.
When people think of countries that are tech powerhouses they think primarily of Japan and the U.S. But a free trade agreement currently under negotiation between Canada and India may help the latter get that much closer to joining the club—and expand Canada's economy by at least $6 billion.
It's called the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) and grew out of a 2010 Canada-India Joint Study recommending trade liberalization. (In addition to this, there are other, smaller agreements currently under negotiation, such as the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement.)
At present, Canada's trade with India is a modest, though not insignificant $5.2 billion. But that trade has been growing quickly, with the merchandise portion (about 80% of total trade) up 73% since 2004. This reflects the reality of the developing world's strong growth in contrast to mature economies which are just muddling along. For comparison, Canada's GDP grew at 3.2% in 2010, while India saw 9%—and that's in the middle of a global economic slump. And until recently, direct investment from India was insignificant but exploded by 2,900% in 2008, almost in concert with the economic implosion in the west. India hasn't looked back since.
Tech and infrastructure businesses are going to benefit the most from liberalized trade, says Rana Sarkar, president and CEO of the Canada-India Business Council at BMO Capital Markets. He singles out clean tech in particular as being "huge." Core infrastructure, resources and services businesses should all do well because of India's need for the basic building blocks of economic development.
Tony Balasubramanian, partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers tech consulting practice, agrees: "Energy is a big issue in India as it is in all the BRIC countries. From an energy and base infrastructure perspective I think there's a great opportunity for Canadian companies in India." He adds that robotics is another industry that should see measurable gains as a result of any deal.
There have so far been five business roundtables—the last was in July—bringing together government and business leaders from both countries. One major participant has been SNC-Lavalin. In a statement, Ronald Denom, president of SNC-Lavalin International, said, "As far as the high-tech industry goes, some of the advantages that free trade with India would bring to Canadian companies include privileged access to a very large and rapidly growing market for their goods and services, additional sources of both financial and human capital, and greater exposure to 'frugal innovation,' which is an interesting characteristic of the Indian high-tech markets and extremely relevant for companies seeking to expand their worldwide sales in emerging markets.”
In the other direction, India's tech sector—characterized by IT and tech consulting firms like Tata and Infosys—could benefit immensely from liberalized trade between the two countries. However, Sarkar says the opportunity stretches beyond IT. "There's a number of industries where India has strengths—there's a number of engineering companies that are increasingly involved globally, and those are broadly service sector expertise. Indians have a strong interest in making sure that's part of the negotiations as well. But also broadly in terms of investment, Indian companies are fairly aggressive, looking globally, both as kind of a risk hedge on their side to their own domestic growth."
Perhaps already leading the way is Wipro (NYSE: WIT), which, at a market value of US$23B, is now the world's largest third-party engineering services firm. It opened a new office in Mississauga, Ont., in February 2011, characterizing the expansion as part of its "plans to intensify its focus on Canada, as one of the strategic geographies supporting Wipro’s growth."
Trade negotiations on the Canadian side are being headed up by Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway. The feds say an agreement is expected to be reached by 2013 after which it goes to Parliament. (Note that the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement signed in 1987 took effect a year later.)
Satish Thakkar, president of the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce, which has been involved in the talks, says the chamber is satisfied with the pace of negotiations. He points to no major stumbling blocks, but cautions that "given the scope of CEPA, negotiations are likely to be protracted."
SNC-Lavalin's Denom says "we are still a long way from a free trade agreement with India."
However, in talking to these folks, the optimism is palpable, and with good reason. There's still a lot to be done in India and that means plenty of opportunity. Yet at the same time, India is more than just another sweatshop outpost—Indian companies are big players and they'll also be setting up shop in Canada and spending investment dollars. And that's quite a bit different from the free trade relationship between, say, Canada and Mexico.
Says Sarkar, "India is being built at the moment so all these things that we do really well in Canada, like soft infrastructure—rules and regulations when you're building a new town, how to set up associations, architectural engineering—all of those things are going to go through an enormous growth curve in India."
Opposition MPs are disturbed that
Canada barely hit the low end of its target admission rate for
grandparents and parents as permanent residents to Canada last year,
while more than 150,000 lingered in line.
Two top bureaucrats from Citizenship and Immigration
Canada took MPs on the immigration committee, who are mostly new to the
committee, through a kind of Immigration 101 departmental briefing on
Sept. 29.
They told MPs about the government's levels plan, a guide
the immigration minister tables in Parliament each year on or before
Nov. 1 that includes the number of foreign nationals projected to become
permanent residents in the following year, and a range for each
category of permanent resident.
Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux, his party's immigration
critic, noted that the department's 2010 immigration levels plan had a
target admission rate of between 15,000 and 18,000 in the parents and
grandparents category. Canada accepted 15,324 applicants.
Meanwhile, by the end of 2010, 150,965 applications were
waiting to be processed in that category. That backlog ballooned to
165,000 as of March 2011.
The government has set the bar lower for this year. The 2011 admission range is 13,000 to 17,500.
The grandparents and parents category is not the only one
where the government missed its high target in 2010. According to CIC
statistics released in September, the admission rates fell below the
upper ends of the ranges set in the levels plan for almost all
non-economic classes of immigrants to Canada. That includes other
family-class immigrants such as spouses and children, as well as
refugees.
But the government exceeded its maximum targets in almost
all economic immigrant categories. In 2010, Canada accepted 280,681
immigrants in total, the highest level since 1957, exceeding its 265,000
maximum target. The extra admissions all came from the economic side.
The government's emphasis on admitting economic immigrants is no secret.
"Everything I've tried to do over the past
three-and-a-half years has been focused on making immigration work
better for the Canadian economy and making the Canadian economy work
better for immigrants. So that's really the number one focus," Mr.
Kenney told Embassy late last month.
'And, of course, they're dying'
Looking past the numbers, the backlog in the grandparents and parents category, in human terms, is distressing to some MPs.
The CIC website estimates that it's taking staff currently
48 months to assess sponsors in Canada and up to another 55 months to
assess the person being sponsored.
"These are the kind of numbers that I think all of us MPs
see in our office all the time when people come in and say it's taking
eight, nine, 10, 13 years to sponsor parents," said NDP immigration
critic Don Davies, in the committee meeting. "And, of course, they're
dying."
In responding to Mr. Lamoureux's question why Canada fell
short of its high target for the grandparents and parents category, Les
Linklater, assistant deputy minister for strategic and program policy,
explained that applicants sometimes contribute to delays between the
first and second steps of the process.
"Once our processing centre in Mississauga actually
releases a sponsorship to our overseas network, it can take any number
of months for [applicants] to actually respond to our request to fill
out our application forms completely, provide supporting documentation,
do their medicals," he told the committee.
Dawn Edlund, associate assistant deputy minister for
operations, added that because CIC staff end up spending a lot of time
chasing after applicants to get the documents they need to make
decisions, the department has moved to stop "babysitting files." The
department encourages applicants to give the completed application up
front, and if they don't do that, they must start again.
CIC is also updating the way it processes immigration
applications by using technology, and moving files from place to place
rather than people. That's helping to streamline the process, said the
officials.
They are working toward a service standard in the spouse
or common-law partner category to process 80 per cent of applications
within 12 months. But that service standard doesn't apply to the parents
and grandparents category.
Mr. Kenney has acknowledged the backlog and said during
the last election campaign that a Conservative government would admit
more parents and grandparents in 2011 than the 15,324 admitted in 2010.
He is also about to start stakeholder consultations about developing an
action plan for faster family reunification.
"I'm not going to include or exclude any remedies," he said.
But he added that last year, nearly 40,000 people applied
in the parents and grandparents program. "We cannot realistically admit
40,000 parents and grandparents. That would end up displacing economic
immigrants. And I think it's hard to justify a huge increase in
admissions for people who will be dependents."
He said all of the economic research he's seen indicates
that older immigrants "constitute a net fiscal burden on Canadian
society."
But others including NDP immigration committee member Jinny Sims, question that.
"I've got many families living in my riding where one of
the partners would love to be able to go out to work," she said in an
interview with Embassy. "And if they knew that the parents, the
grandparents, were there to look after the children, they would have
that security and they would gladly go out to work. And that would add
to our economy. And happy families are more productive in their
workplace."
Queen's University law faculty associate dean Sharryn
Aiken said the assumption that family-class immigrants don't benefit
Canada economically is flawed because it uses a short-term time horizon.
In the long term, she said, "They are contributing to the success of
that family's settlement and integration, for the family that's here
already."
Plus, the system is already set up to ensure parents and
grandparents are not an economic burden on Canadian society. Sponsors
and applicants have to have enough money in their bank accounts to
support applicants, she said. And the government has the legal tools to
go after defaulting sponsors if need be.
She said the government should do fact-based research to help it determine the correct immigration levels and mix.
To clear up the backlog the government must devote
appropriate resources to ensure it can process the applications in the
queue in a timely way, she said.
"Clearly, without intake control at the front end we will
continue to have these types of challenges where processing times grow,"
Mr. Linklater told MPs. "I think that's one of the key lessons that
ministerial instructions have showed us in the skilled worker category,
in that by restricting intake we have been able to work through the
backlog that much more quickly."
In 2008, Mr. Kenney issued instructions to visa officers
to prioritize the intake of skilled workers from a select list of
high-demand jobs, or people with job offers or are already living in
Canada.
One of the questions the department floated to
participants in summer consultations on the right immigration mix and
levels for Canada was whether the immigration minister should use his
authority to instruct visa officers to limit intake in other categories,
such as parents and grandparents.
When asked whether Mr. Kenney should use ministerial
instructions to limit the intake of the grandparents and parents
category, Conservative MP and immigration committee member Chungsen
Leung said, "I think it warrants serious consideration."
Ms. Sims disagreed. "I would be very disturbed if in
Canada we started to use those kind of policies," she said. "Because
what are we saying then? We're doing to pick and choose which families
can live together? We're going to pick and choose whose parents get to
come to join them, or whose grandparents? Which child gets to enjoy
their grandparents?"
She says the solution is to use the fees the government
collects from applicants to get rid of the backlog, and then look at
more long-term solutions. That means hiring more staff, she said.
For his part, Mr. Kenney said he wouldn't want to prejudge the outcome of his upcoming backlog consultations.
Meanwhile, the immigration committee started an eight-hearing study on system backlogs this week.
Published October 5, 2011 
