Immigration Minister Jason Kenney elaborates on the transformational changes to Canada’s immigration model

Immigration
Immigration (Photo credit: lcars)

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

Q: What are the most important changes to Canada's immigration program?
The Prime Minister gave an indication at his speech in Davos. We are re-focusing immigration reforms on Canada’s labour market.
We are embarking on a program of transformational change to move from a slow, rigid and passive, really a supply-driven immigration system, to a fast, flexible and pro-active, demand-driven immigration system.
One of the most important reforms is the massive expansion of the provincial nominee programs which has resulted in a better geographic distribution of immigrants across Canada.
The number of immigrant going to Manitoba has tripled; to Saskatchewan has quadrupled; to Alberta and Atlantic Canada has doubled.
This is all good news.
Q: What about the long-standing problem of immigrants' un- and under-employment?
We are starting to see signs of improvement in the economic outcomes of more recent immigrants, those coming through the provincial nominee program because they typically have jobs lined up. More recent arrivals under the skilled worker program are also doing better, especially those with pre-arranged employment.
Q: What other reforms are important?
We have high unemployment in an economy with large labour shortages. And this, frankly, frustrates the hell out of me - that we're bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the country to face many of them end up un- or underemployed in an economy where there are acute labour shortages.
Q: How do we resolve this paradox?
We need to get better results for newcomers and get better results for immigration. This is the most important public policy question of our time.
We need to deal decisively with the legacy backlogs. We took action starting in 2009, and reduced the backlog in half.
But we must do more or we’ll just be carrying forward the backlog for years. We won't be able to get to a situation where we can bring in people with pre-arranged jobs in a matter of months which is what you need if you want an immigration system that is responsive to the labour market.
We’re bringing forth amendments to the immigration act to return about 100,000 applications involving about 300,000 individuals, application which have been in the system from 2001-2008. We’ll return the application fees.
This will allow us to move to a just-in-time system, a working inventory in our skilled worker system, where in about 18 months, so by 2014, we will be admitting people who apply within months.
Q: Why is that important?
That speed will be critically important so we can then go to employers and say, look at the global labour market and actively recruit people from abroad who can work at their skill level.
We are going to create a pool of qualified immigrant applicants who have given us permission to share their applications and then the employers can go into that pool and essentially we will run queries for them to pull out.
We will do a revision of our points selection grid to put more emphasis on younger people with Canadian, as opposed to overseas, experience. We will give priority to those with pre-arranged employment offers in Canada.
We will raise the language benchmarks for those who want to work in higher-end occupations but we also want to introduce more flexibility to create a skilled trades scheme because we have a skilled trades shortage.
Finally and I think one of the most exciting reforms we're looking at doing is a re-assessment of how we assess education and qualifications, again emulating the Aussies and New Zealanders.
Q: Yes, immigrants have long complained about the difficulty in getting recognition for their overseas credentials.
Part of that is, yes, the result of gate keeping on the part of licensed professions and part of it is some of the foreign professionals we bring to Canada lack our standards. We owe them truth in advertising. We owe them an honest assessment of their chances of licensure upon arrival in Canada.
We will identify organizations that have expertise in assessing foreign education.
And in a couple of years we hope to bring in a similar form of pre-assessment of professional credentials working with the national bodies that represent the 45 regulated professions.
We will do a pre-assessment of whether an application has a better than average chance of getting a license as an engineer in Canada.
The whole concept here is to stop the madness of just dropping immigrants into our labour market to sink or swim even if they really don’t have a reasonable shot at getting their license.
It’s a waste of human capital. It’s an opportunity cost for our economy. By creating a better qualified pool of prospective immigrants who are going to have much higher rates of success in getting their licenses, they will all do much better.
Q: Any other changes?
We will also be re-designing our investor immigration program. We believe that the program is massively underselling Canada because it’s based on only an $800,000 loan for five years which people get back minus the commissions.
There are millions of millionaires interested in immigrating to Canada. The bar must be higher.
Canadian experience class is the most important thing we’ve done in immigration reform to date. We’re going to be making that a little more flexible because for me it's the model program. These young people are pre-integrated.
I really do believe that when we look back on the consequence of these changes five years from now. I am absolutely confident we’ll see as a result of these changes a marked improvement in the economic outcome of immigrants and that we're doing a massively better job of linking that to the labour shortages.
Q: is there any discussion of taking multilateral approach to credential recognition?
Yes, but we can’t trigger that because it's provincial jurisdiction. Now some provinces and some of their licensing bodies are doing that. Quebec signed an agreement with France to move towards mutual recognition of credentials.
Manitoba and Saskatchewan have gone to some of the better nurses colleges in the Philippines and they’ve added supplementary courses to train nurses up to the provincial standards so when they write their tests in Manila they know they are qualified to get their licenses as an RN in Manitoba or Saskatchewan.
It is massively complex: 45 professions times 10 provinces so there’s no simple solution.
Q: Do you anticipate a lawsuit by immigration lawyers regarding the backlog changes?
We've obviously done very careful legal analysis. We are confident what were doing is lawful and can withstand any legal challenge.
I don’t think we understood the nature of the problem when we came to government. I think we were overwhelmed when we opened up the filing drawer at immigration and found 850,000 applications in there in 2006.
Q: What about the citizenship ceremony and banning the niqab? What is behind that?
The citizenship oath is supposed to be taken seriously. That's our expectation. We were not able to verify that people are saying it when their faces are covered.
For me, it’s also about the nature of an oath. It’s a public licensing, a declaration of your membership in the community and you do that in front of your fellow citizens in public. To obscure yourself at that essentially public moment when you’re making a legal undertaking in front of your fellow citizens undermines the nature of the public oath.
Q: What has been the reaction?
I think what we did has been broadly accepted. I’ve been surprised at the number of Muslims who’ve come up to me and commended us for the decision.
It also sends another message which is yes, this is a liberal democracy though of course we have no interest in regulating what you wear.
I am a critic of the French approach which seeks to regulate people's habillements in their lives in the public space but at moments like this when there an interaction between an individual and the state, it’s not unreasonable to ask people to show who you are. Polls show 85% of people agree with this.
Q: Aren’t they just practising their religion? Did you consider the possibility they could be accommodated?
We could put them in a separate room with a woman officer and that’s segregation.
Q: Is that really segregation or separation?
I think it comes back to the essentially public nature of the citizenship ceremony and the oath. There’s a reason we do these things in groups we don’t just swear people in privately in an office.
No one is obliged to take the citizenship oath. If they feel stronger about hiding their faces, they don’t have to take the oath.
In our citizenship guide, we talk about Canadian multiculturalism and the fact it doesn’t extend to forced marriage, female genital mutilation, etc. We are sending a signal that certain barbaric practises are not welcome in Canada. There are certain legal limits and cultural norms about women in Canadian society.
Q: Is this the French approach?
No. I’m a big champion of a broad-minded approach to pluralism. One of the reasons the Canadian experience has been successful on integration and diversity is because we adapted an organic approach to accommodating differences. But we shouldn’t be shy in emphasizing core liberal values. If people choose to wear the niqab, that’s their business. But I hope that little girls who grow up in Canada don’t think it is an obligation.
Q: Are you contemplating removing the Mexican visa any time soon?
We did this in June, 2009. We should have done it in 2007 but we held back because of the special relationship with Mexico. We regret it has been frustrating and there has been a decline in tourism.
The new refugee system that we anticipate will be put in place this fall, we need to assess how effective it is. At some point after that, we will go back and re-consider the visa exemption.
We have to make sure the system is working probably. We could take a look at it in 2013.
Q: Which countries does Canada compete with to attract the best and brightest immigrants?
Australia and New Zealand are our competition. If you’re the top graduate from IIT in Hyderabad and Australia takes you in six months and we say take a number, and we’ll get back to you in eight years, then obviously they won't come to Canada.
The rigidity and slowness of our system has meant we cannot move people through the system fast enough.

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Immigration system update boosts skilled trades

Construction Work
Construction Work (Photo credit: gullevek)

Skilled tradespeople who want to immigrate to Canada will be getting a separate, streamlined program later this year, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says.
"We are facing huge and growing labour shortages in Canada, particularly here in the West and in Alberta," Kenney said at a construction site in Calgary Tuesday.
"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 current federal skilled worker program assesses applicants on a 100-point grid, with a pass mark of 67. The grid takes into account the candidate's official language ability, education, work experience, age, whether they have a job offer in Canada and their overall adaptability, according to a news release from Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
The grid favoured professionals rather than workers in the skilled trades, who make up only three per cent of entrants to Canada under the federal skilled worker program. The program has a backlog of 280,000 applicants, leading the government to propose refunding the $400 fee to those who applied prior to Feb. 27, 2008, and now want to withdraw their applications.
Kenney said there will be tens of billions of dollars in new construction in Alberta in the next 10 years, with the country facing huge gaps in skilled workers for the same time period.
"There really is virtually no meaningful access to Canada for skilled tradespeople to come here as immigrants, as permanent residents, and make a lasting contribution to our economy," he said.
Kenney said an updated skilled worker program will be unveiled later in 2012. It is expected to include a separate stream for skilled tradespeople, including those in construction, transportation, manufacturing and the service industry.

More emphasis on practical training

The proposed program would let skilled tradespersons be assessed "based on criteria geared towards their reality, putting more emphasis on practical training and work experience rather than formal education," the news release said.
The news was well-received by employers with projects in the West, where the energy and construction sectors are sucking up workers faster than Canada can produce them.
The Canadian vice-president of human resources for CH2M Hill, a global infrastructure and energy company, said Tuesday's announcement shows the government is aware of the challenges businesses face.
"At CH2M Hill, we make it a priority to hire qualified Canadians. We've got aggressive recruiting programs across Canada, but sometimes our needs in certain sectors simply outstrip our supply of various skilled labour categories and other types of workers," David Larter said.
CH2M Hill now employs about 2,000 people in hundreds of projects across Canada.
Larter said his company hopes to double staff in Canada in the coming years — but he adds that won't be possible if immigrants aren't part of the equation.

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Immigration Canada: Feds Create New Program To Bring In Skilled Trades People

Canada
Canada (Photo credit: palindrome6996)

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."
— With files from Bill Graveland

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Citizenship and Immigration Canada Announces its Intention to Create a New Skilled Trades Program


CALGARY, ALBERTA, Apr 10, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- To fill Canada's growing labour shortages in construction, natural resources and similar industries, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced plans today to make it easier for skilled tradespersons to immigrate to Canada.
The announcement is the latest in a series Minister Kenney has made about transforming Canada's immigration system into a fast and flexible system focused on jobs, growth and prosperity.
"Our Government recognizes that our country faces a critical shortage in certain skilled trades," said Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney. "That's why we are taking concrete steps to address this problem at a national level."
Under the modernized Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) to be unveiled later this year, CIC intends to create a separate and streamlined program for skilled tradespersons. Skilled trades include occupations in construction, transportation, manufacturing and service industries. Skilled tradespersons are in high demand in Canada particularly in the natural resources and construction sectors.
Currently, FSW applicants are assessed against a 100-point grid, with a pass mark of 67. The grid takes into account the candidate's official language ability, education, work experience, age, whether they have a job offer in Canada (arranged employment), and their overall adaptability (which awards points for things like previous work or study in Canada, spouse's education and relatives in Canada).
Some criteria in the FSW grid, such as years of education, have traditionally favoured professionals and managers more than skilled trades, and thus skilled tradespersons only make up 3 percent of all FSWs entering Canada. During CIC's consultations on FSWP modernization over the past year, stakeholders also agreed that changes were necessary to make the program more accessible to tradespersons.
The proposed FSWP Skilled Trades program would create a means for skilled tradespersons to be assessed based on criteria geared towards their reality, putting more emphasis on practical training and work experience rather than formal education. The new skilled trades stream would avoid some of the complexities of the traditional points grid. Skilled trades applicants will, however, need to meet minimum language requirements, given the importance of language as a determinant of immigrant success.
"Above all, our Government remains focused on promoting economic growth and long-term prosperity," said Minister Kenney. "Attracting skilled tradespeople is important for maintaining Canada's momentum in the global economy."
If approved, further details about the Skilled Trades program and the revised FSWP are expected to be announced later in 2012. The full regulatory changes to the FSWP will also be published in the Canada Gazette in due course.

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