Applicants furious at change in Canada's immigration law

fields a question from a community member at the All Candidates Forum at McKenzie Lake Community Centre in Calgary's Southeast on January 14th, 2006. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

MARK MACKINNON AND GLORIA GALLOWAY
BEIJING AND OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail

Six years ago, Sun Mingliang thought he had discovered something wonderful. With his background managing a plastics company, he believed he qualified for immigration to Canada under the Federal Skilled Workers Program. A native of Shenzhen, China, he applied, along with his wife and young daughter, to immigrate and was so certain of success that he spent thousands of dollars on English classes for the three of them.


But instead of the life in Canada that he dreamed of, Mr. Sun was set to spend the upcoming weekend sleeping on the pavement outside the Hong Kong skyscraper that houses the Canadian consulate. Furious at a change in immigration law that cancels applications filed before 2008 in an effort to reduce backlog, the 43-year-old says he will go without food until Monday in a desperate effort to get the attention of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

Mr. Sun was among several dozen protesters who gathered outside Hong Kong’s Exchange Square on Friday, shouting slogans and delivering two letters of protest to diplomats who came down from their 14th-floor offices to meet them. A few of the demonstrators pitched tents on the sidewalk and said they planned to stay there all weekend.

“The new policy is a heavy blow for us. So many years of waiting, so much time invested, so many years of hoping. If they told us earlier, we’d have made other plans,” he said, speaking by mobile phone as he prepared to bed down for the night outside the consulate, the same place where he filed for the visa in 2006. “This hunger strike is my way of communicating my helplessness and sadness. It’s resistance by physical means.”

Anger at the changes is high in Hong Kong and southern China. Many people there have family ties to Canada, which accepted a flood of immigrants from Hong Kong before 1997, when the former British colony rejoined China. Of the 284,000 applicants worldwide who would be bumped out of line by the changes, about 12,000 are from mainland China or Hong Kong. The government has set aside $130-million to refund application fees and says applicants are free to try again under the new criteria.

“We applied to immigrate to Canada because we believed that Canada is governed by the rule of law and treats everyone equally. Sadly, your conduct reveals an alternative, sinister side of Canada, one mirroring the same attitude toward the people [we]in autocracies are used to suffering,” read a letter that was addressed to Mr. Kenney and signed “Chinese victims of FSW” (the initials of the Federal Skilled Workers program).

This program was previously altered in 2008, when 19 occupations were designated as priorities for immigration. Many of those left waiting have skills that are not on the new priority list. Stricter language requirements were also introduced in 2008.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Kenney said Friday that the Conservatives had inherited an immigration system from the former Liberal government that was slow and “collapsing” due to the heavy backlog. That made it impossible to respond to Canada’s rapidly changing labour market needs, Ana Curic said.

The elimination of the backlog “was a difficult but necessary decision,” Ms. Curic said. “We want an immigration system that is fast and flexible, in which applicants receive decisions in a few months, instead of eight long years. We invite everyone in the current backlog to apply to come to Canada under the new system. A new system that processes applications in a few short months and not a decade is good for Canada and good for immigrants.”

The protesters appear to be quite familiar with the Canadian parliamentary system. The letter presented to diplomats complained that Mr. Kenney was pushing through the changes as part of a budget bill, meaning the proposal to throw out old immigration applications would not be debated on its own merits. “The message you are sending is: ‘Don’t wait patiently in the immigration queue. Charter a ship, sail to Canada, seek asylum and be supported by the government while you await our decision,’” the missive warns.

“The new policy is very harsh,” said Emily Xiang, an organizer of the protests. “I’m 41 and my husband is 48. [Now they say]our occupations do not meet their requirements. But I’m an accountant and my husband is an engineer, which did meet their requirements six years ago. They kept delaying, and now they say, ‘You can apply again.’ Such shamelessness.”

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Priority for Canada: More children

Happy Canada Day (Photo credit: Anirudh Koul)

The latest census figures show Canada’s birth rate stuck way below the replacement level. For every 100 adults there are only 80 children — a drop of 20 per cent in a generation. (Small comfort that a few years ago the drop was 25 per cent.)

In the long run, this “baby bust” is unsustainable. In 200 years, for example, our population of 34 million would collapse to only 7 million descendents.

Is immigration the answer? There are practical limitations to how high immigration rates can be tolerated. Many people, rightly or wrongly, fear that massive immigration may overwhelm their way of life.

And we have to recognize that immigration is a two-edged sword: Canadians who leave (for the U.S. mostly) sometimes outnumber the immigrants who come in — as has happened in many decades already, for example, from 1860 to 1900 and again in the 1930s.

Sooner or later, then, we should seriously raise the birth rate. The longer we leave it, the more problems we will have. A declining population requires a painful downsizing in many institutions, from schools and churches to shopping malls. This downsizing, already occurring in many of Canada’s smaller communities, will only get worse if the baby bust continues.

And as fewer children are born every generation, the number of young people shrinks and shrinks. Another decade of baby bust will give us a Canada where there are more people in their 60s than any other age. This greying of our population means that in the long run there will be a lot fewer workers to support retirees with the Canada Pension Plan, so that the premiums each worker must pay into the plan will more than double. Even more important than this increasing pension burden may be the social consequences: a population with few young people may have a lot less joie de vivre.

How did we arrive at our unsustainably low birth rate? Of the many reasons, one of the most interesting is that some parents feel — often vaguely but nevertheless strongly enough to influence their decision — that stopping at two children will “replace themselves,” and even achieve a levelling out of population growth.

There is a huge catch in this, however. Remember that some women have fewer than two children (they may have fertility problems or choose to be childless). So to maintain a level population, there must be some women who have more than two children.

So the three-child family (or more) should be recognized as a great benefit to the nation — the only way, except for uncertain immigration, to stem the looming population decline.

Fortunately, many of the policies that would encourage parents to have more children are the same policies that simple justice requires. To take one of many examples, the federal government should allow income splitting for all couples, not just pensioned couples.

Another helpful policy would be to reduce post-secondary tuition, to free parents from some of the worry about how to pay for their children’s education. Even more important, this would reduce the burden of paying off student loans, which falls disproportionately on those with lower incomes.

As well as government policy, it is also important to look at personal decision-making at the family level. When couples with one or two children weigh whether or not to have another, they usually are very aware of the costs involved. Maybe they also should be aware of the benefits, including those that may be overlooked because they cannot be captured with statistics.

For instance, children with more siblings have more opportunities to learn to share and to negotiate — two invaluable life skills.

Or a couple with two sons, for example, who go on to have a daughter, may feel that if they had never had this child, it would have left a real hole in their life — regardless of whether it was a girl or a boy.

And if the parents go on to three or more children, until they have both genders, it is not only they who will enjoy the additional variety. Most children will have both a brother and a sister — a diversity not available to the one- or two-child family.

But surely the greatest benefit of having more children is in knowing that each birth, whether it is the first or fourth, is likely to create a lifetime of immeasurable value — that will overwhelm whatever costs the parents incurred, unless they are exceptionally disadvantaged.

So the reward for larger families goes far beyond the satisfaction that comes from contributing to the viability of Canada as we know it. There is a much deeper contentment for parents in knowing that raising their children is the most creative and loving thing that most couples can ever do.

Tom Wonnacott taught statistics at the University of Western Ontario for 40 years.

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