Ottawa loses legal battle over immigration backlog

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)

Nicholas Keung
Immigration Reporter

Ottawa has suffered a major setback in eliminating its immigration backlog after the federal court ruled the government is obliged to process all applications it accepted into the system.

About 900 applicants under the federal skilled workers’ program sued Immigration Minister Jason Kenney for violating the pledge to assess and finalize decisions in a timely fashion.

They asked the court to order the immigration department to process their applications within a reasonable time frame.

In a decision released Thursday, Justice Donald Rennie rejected the minister’s argument that the delay is justified because he has the authority to make policies.

“The minister can set instructions that permit him to return some applications without processing them at all, and thus obviously there is no further duty in respect of those applications,” the judge wrote in a 24-page decision.

“However, for those that are determined eligible for processing, the duty to do so in a reasonably timely manner remains.”

In February 2008, the law was changed to give Kenney authority to issue ministerial instructions regarding which applications would be eligible for processing and to remove the obligation to process each application received.

As a result, the litigants argued, their applications were “warehoused” in a lengthy backlog from five to nine years.

Despite the new measure, the court said Ottawa still failed to finalize a file within the six and 12 months Kenney promised — the first ministerial applications have been outstanding between 24 and 52 months.

Immigration has until Oct. 14 to finalize the application of the case’s lead litigant, an IT project manager in China.

Although the court falls short on making an order for all 900 applicants, Thursday’s decision sets the stage for the prompt processing of the other litigants.

“So long as the applicants are not to blame for the delay, a fair application of Justice Rennie’s ruling would require Ottawa to finalize their applications by October 14,” said their lawyer, Tim Leahy.

The decision is final because the court refused the minister’s request for appeal, added Leahy. The next step is for opposing counsels to determine how to proceed with the remaining cases.

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Immigrants who don’t speak English or French end up working in ethnic ‘enclaves:’ report

Citizenship@MaRS (Photo credit: mars_discovery_district)

Peter O'Neil, Postmedia News

OTTAWA — Immigrants who work in ethnic “enclaves” in major cities earn less than other Canadians and have a tougher time adapting to this country’s economy, according to an internal federal government document.

“Studies found that enclaves have a negative impact on the earnings growth for male and female immigrants,” says a report obtained under the Access to Information Act by immigration lawyer Richard Kurland.

The point was included in a federal report prepared in early 2011 to assess minimum language standards for immigrants brought to Canada under the “provincial nominee” (PN) program.

The report focused on concerns within Citizenship and Immigration Canada about the ability of program nominees in some provinces to speak one of Canada’s two official languages.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney recently acted on those concerns, announcing in April that program applicants in semi- and low-skilled jobs will be required to meet minimum language standards in English or French starting July 1.

More than 38,000 workers and their families came to Canada in 2011 under the program, which has become hugely popular with provincial governments seeking to meet severe labour shortages.

The report obtained by Kurland cited research showing that immigrants who can speak English or French adequately have earnings comparable to their Canadian-born counterparts.

But those who don’t speak an official language struggle in the labour force and often end up working in “enclave” immigrant communities in major cities.

The report said the number of immigrants working in a non-official language jumped 14 per cent between 2001 and 2006, involving 611,000 people.

Roughly one in six immigrants “only” used a non-official language and of this group, close to 60 per cent indicated they couldn’t conduct a conversation in English or French.

“While some researchers point to the possibility of such immigrants becoming employed in an ethnically sheltered (enclave) economy, several recent studies have shown that there are many disadvantages to doing this,” according to the report.

Several studies, for instance, showed that jobs in these enclaves are mostly in the lower-paying service industries, and taking those jobs can put the employee in a rut.

“Exposure to one’s group reduces the accumulation of skills specific to the host country’s labour market, decreases the knowledge of the local native language and impedes immigrants’ economic progress,” the report said.

The report also found that workers who speak little or no English or French face greater risks in terms of occupational health and safety, since they tend to be in physically demanding occupations and may be unaware of their rights.

Language proficiency also plays a critical role in the social integration of immigrants and their young children, it said. “It has a direct relationship with newcomers’ ability to settle, adapt and integrate into Canadian society.”

A federal government-funded 2009 research paper by University of British Columbia geography professor Daniel Hiebert, which looked at immigrant enclaves in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, said those areas have higher unemployment levels and that residents are “slightly” more dependent on government transfers.

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Who are the richest 1 per cent in Canada? They’re not just CEOs

special edition (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

TAVIA GRANT

The Globe and Mail

For all the hue and cry over Canada’s richest 1 per cent, little is known about just who they are.

Until now. A new picture of that rarified club shows they are overwhelmingly men, older men in particular. They tend to have university degrees, and half of them work more than 50 hours a week. They’re not, by any stretch, all bankers: they are also doctors, dentists, managers and veterinarians, who earn at least $230,000 a year to qualify.

A paper released last week by University of British Columbia economics professors sheds new light on income inequality trends in Canada, who the top earners are and what policies might best address the country’s growing income gap.

They find, broadly speaking, that income distribution has not been this uneven in Canada since “the dark days of the Great Depression.”

“The ratcheting-up of inequality in Canada is real,” the 43-page paper says. “Whatever else it achieved, the Occupy movement shone a light on our growing inequality.”

Income inequality has been hotly debated in the past year, and a raft of recent studies has shown it is widening in most advanced economies. Growing income disparity has been linked with deteriorating outcomes for health-care, crime and long-term economic growth.

In Canada, about 8 per cent of the country's total income was concentrated in the hands of 1 per cent of the population back in the late 1970s. In recent years, that almost doubled to 14 per cent, the UBC paper said, which is based in part on details from the 2006 long-form census.

Reasons for the growing chasm vary. The wage gap between those with a university degree and those with just high school is widening. Younger workers are facing worse earnings prospects than a generation ago. Outsourcing, declining unionization rates and technological change may also be playing a role.

Policies that could narrow the gap include closing tax loopholes, hiking taxes on the richest 1 per cent and increasing refundable tax credits to lower-income Canadians, the authors say. Making the education system more flexible and reducing high school dropout rates could help support the middle class.

Here are some more of the findings from the study, entitled “Canadian Inequality: Recent Development and Policy Options”:

• The top 1 per cent of earners amount to 275,000 individuals.
• Fifty-two percent of people in the top 1 per cent work at least 50 hours a week, compared to less than 20 per cent for the overall population.
• One needs an annual income of at least $230,000 to be part of the top 1 per cent. The average income in this group is $450,000, compared to only $36,000 for the whole Canadian population.
• One could safely call this a brotherhood -- 83 per cent of those in the top 1 per cent are men. “So despite the significant gains realized by women over the last few decades, they remain dramatically underrepresented at the very top of the income distribution.”
• Young people (under age 35) are also underrepresented in the top income group, though this may just be transitory as most haven't yet reached their peak life-cycle earnings.
• Fifty-eight percent of individuals at the top have at least a bachelors’ degree, a greater proportion than the broader population, where 19 per cent of the adult population are university graduates.
• Top earners hail from a variety of sectors. Just 10 per cent of people in the top 1 per cent work in the finance and insurance industry (despite garnering most of the public’s wrath). Senior managers and CEOs are over-represented in the top group, but still only account for 14 per cent of top earners. The only other large group of top income earners? Physicians, dentists and veterinarians who comprise almost 10 per cent of top earners, despite representing less than 1 per cent of the workforce.

The paper was jointly written by UBC’s Nicole Fortin, David Green, Thomas Lemieux, Kevin Milligan and Craig Riddell for the Canadian Labour Market and Skills Researcher Network.

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Feds to track down failed refugees collecting welfare

Canada (Photo credit: palindrome6996)

By Tom Godfrey, QMI Agency


TORONTO – The feds are cracking down on bogus refugees who have either gone underground or returned home while still collecting tax-free welfare cheques.

Immigration officials are moving ahead with a plan to monitor provincial welfare rolls to identify refugees who've abandoned their claims or returned to their homeland and are still receiving benefits.

They will review cases of claimants who've had their cases refused, abandoned or withdrawn but may still be here illegally.

Millions of taxpayers' dollars are being dished out to claimants in Ontario who've lost their cases and have gone underground or returned home without notifying border authorities, government officials estimate.

About 60% of all refugees and immigrants resettle in Ontario and most are eligible for social aid, statistics show.

"(Citizenship and Immigration Canada) said it was pursuing more robust info-sharing on refused/abandoned/withdrawn asylum claims with Ontario social agencies and other relevant federal agencies," wrote Bobby Dagenais, a senior program adviser for the department in a Oct. 2011 memo.

"What is the status of these efforts?" Dagenais asked colleagues that included senior officials of Privy Council and Treasury Board in a document obtained under access to information by lawyer Richard Kurland.

The group was told that Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services "were unwilling to pursue the pilot program that CIC had proposed."

Kurland said Ontario is against the sharing of data on failed refugees.

"Ontario is thwarting Ottawa's efforts to crack down on cases where cheques are sent to people who aren't even in Canada," he said.

Enforcement officials said the program would compare the name of failed claimants against welfare collectors and a match can possibly lead to a person in hiding, their arrest and deportation from Canada.

Many of the failed claimants receiving welfare are sought on warrants for failing to leave Canada after their cases were rejected, officials said.

Some 1,400 hardened criminals and 20,000 others are sought on immigration warrants in the Toronto area, according to the Canada Border Services Agency. It is not known how many are failed claimants.

The proposal was part of a 2003 Canada-U.S. agreement on information-sharing to crack down on fraud, terrorists and failed asylum seekers.

It is among a 30-point action plan to target those who abuse the system following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Charlotte Wilkinson, of the Ministry of Community and Social Services, said her officials have been working with immigration for more than a year on improving the timeliness of their information sharing to ensure only eligible refugee claimants are accessing social assistance.

"We remain committed to ensure that our programs are helping individuals who are legally in Canada and legitimately in need of assistance," Wilkinson said.

The Surprising Global Shortage of Skilled Workers

By Dexter Roberts


Want to find a job? That’s not a problem if you are trained as a technician and looking for work in China or Brazil. Ditto for sales representatives, who are in hot demand in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Japan, engineers won’t sit idle. Meanwhile, in Ireland, IT workers are needed. In the Netherlands, it’s laborers. Even with unemployment running at an historic high of 8.1 percent in the U.S., don’t worry if you are a plumber, welder, or electrician. There’s plenty of demand for your skills.

Even as economists and politicians fret about the problem of global unemployment, those with the right résumés are in hot demand. That’s leading to talent shortages around the world, according to a survey released on May 29 by Milwaukee-based ManpowerGroup (MAN), one of the world’s largest temporary workers agencies.

All told, over one-third of the 38,000 companies Manpower surveyed earlier this year in 41 countries and territories reported that they were unable to find the workers they needed. That is 4 percentage points higher than it was in 2009, during the global financial crisis. The figure is still well below the 41 percent that reported shortages in 2007, before the crisis.

“Companies have gotten sophisticated about who they need and when they need them. In today’s world, it’s ‘stretch out your workplace a bit more and [only] then hire,’” says Jeff Joerres, ManpowerGroup’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Even if we had a robust recovery, I don’t think you are going to see that change. Companies have had too many lessons about how you can get whipsawed the other way.”

Not surprisingly, the largest number of employers reported shortages in Asia, where economies have been relatively resilient to date. Some 45 percent of employers surveyed there cited difficulties in finding the right people to hire. That’s the same number as in 2011, and it’s 17 percentage points above the total when the first survey was carried out in 2006. In the Americas, 41 percent faced challenges getting the right workers, up from 37 percent last year and 34 percent in 2010.

In Europe, as well as the Middle East and Africa, only one-quarter of employers reported labor shortages, similar in number to last year and not much different from pre-crisis levels. That probably reflects the still-precarious nature of the European economy.

The reason companies said they face shortages? The largest share, or 33 percent, said they simply couldn’t find the workers they need. A key issue was a lack of such hard skills as IT knowledge or facility with a foreign language. Insufficient work experience, a dearth of soft skills, or what the survey called “employability”—meaning characteristics like motivation and interpersonal skills, wanting more money, and being unwilling to work part-time—were also factors, in descending order of importance.

Companies will continue to face challenges regarding talent shortages unless educational systems are changed, argues Joerres, who says a major problem is the skills mismatch—the gap between job-seekers’ abilities and what employers need. One way to fix this is to vastly expand the size and number of trade schools, he says.

“The honor of doing and going through a vocational technical program has diminished. Those who would have gone to that school are now going to a four-year university because parents and society say that is what you should do,” says Joerres. “There are not enough welders, plumbers, and draftsmen. We are seeing shortages in these areas. And the pendulum takes a while to swing back.”

Roberts is Bloomberg Businessweek's Asia News Editor and China bureau chief.

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