New immigration system will award more points for language, fewer for work abroad

Nicholas Keung
Immigration Reporter

Ottawa is revamping the point grid it has used for the past 10 years to judge skilled-immigrant applications. The proposed revisions, to go into effect next January, will put more emphasis on language skills and professional credentials equivalent to Canada’s — while de-emphasizing work experience abroad.

This would be the first major overhaul of the immigration point grid system since 2002, when the Liberal government of the day lowered the passing mark and jiggled minor point allocations.

Under amendments to the federal skilled-worker program published Friday, language proficiency — a strong indicator of how well new immigrants do economically — will become the most important factor in whether applicants are approved, worth a maximum of 28 points, up from 24.

The total “passing” mark will remain at 67, but the revised grid will favour younger immigrants by awarding a maximum of 12 points for applicants in the 18-35 age bracket. Applicants over 46 would get 0 points.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada is also proposing to reduce the total number of points given for work experience from 21 to 15, and increase the years of experience required to achieve full points from four years to six.

“These changes will reflect the relative value Canadian employers place on foreign work experience, and redirect points to language and age factors, which are better indicators of success,” said the government statement. .

“Education points would be awarded based on the equivalent Canadian educational credential and points would be redistributed in recognition of the credential’s relevance in the Canadian labour market.”

Applicants with a background in a regulated occupation (medicine or accounting, for example) must also submit to a foreign educational credential assessment by the relevant professional body to establish that a credential earned abroad is equivalent to Canadian requirements.

To address a perpetual labour shortage in the construction industry, Ottawa has also proposed creating a new federal skilled-trades class, which would also be open to people working in natural resources or agriculture production, as well as chefs, cooks, bakers and butchers.

But such applicants need to meet other criteria as well, including having an offer of employment or a provincial certificate of qualification; language proficiency; and 24 months of work experience in the same skilled trade over the past five years.

Changes are also contemplated to the Canadian Experience Class, which allows highly-skilled foreign nationals with Canadian work experience, or graduates from a Canadian university, to apply for permanent residency.

The government is proposing to reduce the work experience required from the current 24 months to 12, over the preceding three years.

Details of Revised Federal Skilled Worker Program Released

osted on August 19, 2012

Skilled tradespersons in eligible vocations like construction work will be able to apply for Canadian permanent residence under the new Federal Skilled Trades Program (FSTP) (Paul Keheler)

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) unveiled information on Friday about the new Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) that will be launched in the new year.

The revised program will have more demanding language requirements, more selective credential assessment, and will give preference to Canadian work experience over foreign work experience, among other changes.

CIC placed a temporary freeze on the acceptance of new applications for the FSWP on July 1st to give the immigration department time to instate change that it said were needed to address shortcomings in the program.

The following are the major changes to the FSWP that were announced in Friday’s release:

Increasing the maximum points awarded for proficiency in an official language, from 16 to 24 points
Awarding a maximum of 12 points to applicants aged 19 to 35, and decreasing the points awarded until age 46
Reducing the maximum number of points awarded for foreign work experience from 21 to 15
Eliminating points awarded for spousal education and awarding points for spousal language proficiency instead
Awarding a maximum of 10 points for Canadian work experience
Awarding points for foreign education credentials based on an assessment of the foreign credential’s equivalent value in Canada as assessed by an organization that is designated to provide credential assessment and authentication
New Federal Skilled Trades Worker Program

In addition to the changes to the FSWP, CIC also announced the details of a new Federal Skilled Trades Program (FSTP) that will be open to tradespersons skilled in eligible trade occupations.

The requirements announced for the FSTP are:

An offer of employment of a duration of least one year from up to two Canadian employers or a Certificate of Qualification from a provincial or territorial Apprenticeship Authority.
Proficiency in an official language
At least two years of work experience in an eligible skilled trade in the last five years
Required qualifications in the skill trade as described by the National Occupational Classification (NOC)
Changes to the Canadian Experience Class

As forecasted by CIC earlier in the year, the Canadian work experience required to qualify for the Canadian Experience Class (CEC) program will be reduced from 24 months to 12 months, to allow temporary foreign workers in Canada to more quickly qualify for Canadian permanent residence status.

Source: http://www.cicsnews.com/?cat=331

Is the Canadian economy in trouble?

By Kevin Press, BrighterLife.ca
June 20, 2012 Topics: Today's economy Comments (24)
“Conditions in the international financial system are fragile.” That is how the Bank of Canada chose to begin its latest Financial System Review, released on June 14. The report goes on to note that our domestic financial system “continues to be robust.” But that good news comes despite a host of risks to the system and to the Canadian economy, including the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, a slowdown in other advanced economies and potential trouble in the Canadian residential real estate market. Consistent with December’s report, the Bank says the risks facing the Canadian financial system are “high.”

I was in to see Sadiq Adatia, chief investment officer of Sun Life Global Investments, last week so I asked him what he thinks about the outlook for Canada. He wasn’t optimistic. After talking about his confidence in the U.S. recovery, he told me: “Canada is turning a corner too, but in the opposite direction.” We may not see gross domestic product growth above 2% this year.

Adatia sees five problems:

Household debt. “We’ve had a great run in our markets, fuelled by consumer spending,” Adatia told me. “Consumers have added a ton of debt to their balance sheets.” Indeed, we learned on June 15 that Canada’s household credit market debt (consumer credit, mortgage and loan debt), measured as a percentage of personal disposable income reached 152% in the first quarter of this year. That’s a new record. Actual borrowing has slowed, but income has too. According to the Bank of Montreal (BMO), the percentage of Canadian households with debt-service ratios above 40% of income – a level considered to be vulnerable by lenders – has risen over 6%. That’s “slightly above the past decade norm,” reports BMO.
Housing prices. Adatia thinks a double-digit drop in prices is possible. “We think there’s going to be a pullback across the board,” he said. “Some regions may be hit harder than others, but I think a 5%-to-15% drop is definitely in the cards.” That may be a conservative call. Across Canada, home prices are up 12% relative to where they were before the most recent recession.
Global factors. No surprise here: There’s trouble in Europe, a slowdown in China and the U.S. recovery (while it gives Adatia reason for optimism) remains vulnerable to global economic factors. These are all potential threats to Canada. By the way, Adatia does not believe there will be a hard landing in China.
Rising interest rates (eventually). Adatia doesn’t expect the Bank of Canada to move on rates this year, but they may start to come up in 2013: “Until we see a better resolution in the eurozone and a stronger U.S. economy, the Bank of Canada is not going to jump out too far ahead, particularly given that the U.S. Federal Reserve has already said it’s not going to raise rates until 2014.” When it happens, higher rates will dampen spending by a lot of highly indebted households.
Unemployment. “We’re probably going to see unemployment move up,” said Adatia. “I’m not convinced the employment picture is really as strong as it looks right now.” The four points listed above could each contribute to job losses.
Are we headed down a path similar to the one Americans took toward the end of the last decade? “These are the same things that were going on in the U.S. economy before it faltered,” Adatia told me. “We’re probably where the U.S. was a few years back.” Meanwhile, the U.S. housing market is showing signs of stabilization and according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans have slashed their debt by about $100 billion since the fourth quarter of 2011.

Keep up to date on what’s happening in the capital markets and the real economy. Subscribe to receive Today’s economy blog automatically by RSS or email.

Canadian universities bridge foreign student tuition gap to attract thousands of Brazilian students

English: The National Institute for Nanotechnology on the north campus of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CAMPBELL CLARK

OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail

Thousands of Brazilian students will fill the halls of Canadian universities over the next four school years as part of the rising South American country’s project to send vast numbers around the world to study science.

For Canadian universities, it’s a chance to add bright recruits from a country with a growing middle class, in the hope that increased research and academic links will continue long past the four years of the scholarship program. But it will also mark a major expansion of ties with an emerging nation that Canada has struggled to bring closer.

Up to 12,000 students will go to Canadian universities and colleges under Brazil’s Science Without Borders scholarship program, that country’s ambitious effort to send 100,000 students to study abroad. In Canada, it is being led not by governments, but by universities, especially a group of graduate research schools that have seized the Brazilian offer.

That means the addition of roughly 3,000 Brazilian students to Canadian schools for a year, in each of the next for years. But the real point is to provide a kick-start that will see more come even when the program ends.

“I think at this point we have less than 500 Brazilian students in Canada,” said Paul Davidson, president of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. “This is an opportunity to build that quickly.”

It is also a chance to build ties to a country whose fast-growing economy is already seventh-largest in the world, and is expected to be in the top five by the end of the decade. Canada’s efforts to increase trade ties have often seemed sluggish.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Brazil last August, in an effort to foster deeper connections, and underlined foreign-student programs as a means. His government has also placed emphasis on recruiting students from countries like India and China, to spur the economy and deepen ties.

“How do you create alignments and collaboration between countries these days?” said Britta Baron, the vice-provost at the University of Alberta responsible for international programs. “Not through pompous diplomatic agreements but through person-to-person interaction on a high level such as science and knowledge. You’re going to end up here with thousands of young Brazilians. They will, in their later life, buy Canadian, act Canadian, work with Canada.”

Marcelo Salviano, a neuroscience PhD student from the University of Brasilia on a one-year exchange at Dalhousie University in Halifax, where he’s studying the impact of environmental factors on Alzheimer’s disease, said he thinks Brazilian students who want an international education will see Canada as a good place to go.

“It is a great experience. It allows you to know other labs, with resources you don’t have in your home country,” he said. Learning English at the same time helps, too. “In the science world, everybody has to write in English, so that’s a great opportunity.”

Canada, he added, “is known as a sort of international country that accepts the differences in culture very well. I didn’t have any kind of racism,” he said. The weather? “Everybody was saying, watch out in January and February, you will die,” he said, laughing. “I got good [winter]clothes and I survived.”

The 3,000 additional students, out of a Canadian student body of about one million, shouldn’t create a shortage of spots in Canadian universities, Mr. Davidson said, as aging populations are leaving schools in some regions with vacancies.

For a while, it seemed likely that Canada would miss out on the Brazilian program. Brazil’s government has set a condition that the students must pay domestic fees, not the higher ones of international students – leaving the question of who would make up the difference. In Ontario, for example, a university student pays about $5,000 in tuition, while foreign students pay two or three times that sum.

Universities didn’t want to discount the difference, and federal and provincial governments did not appear willing to foot the bill. But in the end, Brazil’s government did agree to pay the difference, although for undergraduate students only. Universities will have to decide whether they’ll pay the difference to attract graduate students, Mr. Davidson said.

That could be a to-be-negotiated hurdle, since Brazil is likely to insist on some proportion of graduate students among the 12,000.

But four Canadian universities already have offered to discount the fees for graduate students – a consortium dubbed CALDO including the University of Alberta, Laval, Dalhousie and the University of Ottawa, which has taken the lead in negotiating links with Brazil. They will take 2,840 students, with doctoral students making up the biggest proportion, said Ms. Baron, who spearheaded the creation of the group.

It will bring talented students here, create research links and open opportunities for Canadian students in Brazil, she said – and Canada can gain by respecting what Brazil wants out of it. “The Brazilian side doesn’t want to just shovel people across borders,” Ms. Baron said. “They want to build a younger generation that is much more world-wise and much more innovation-aware. And they want to build lasting partnerships.”

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Governor-General courts Brazil to lure students to Canada

HEATHER SCOFFIELD

OTTAWA — The Canadian Press

Governor-General David Johnston is leading a group of 30 university presidents to Brazil — the biggest such delegation ever sent abroad to promote the benefits of Canadian education.

They will travel to Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo to meet academics and business leaders in the hope of attracting Brazilian students to Canada, and forging academic partnerships with Brazilian researchers.

Why Brazil? Because Brazil beckons.

Students there have ample new funding to study abroad. Canadian universities are thirsty for foreign students. And research interests at Brazilian universities complement many of the going concerns in Canada, Mr. Johnston said in an interview.

“We have seen a very happy strengthening of relationships between Canada and Brazil, especially over the last three or four years,” he said before leaving on the 10-day trip that begins Sunday.

Still, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has just returned from a visit to Colombia, where his dealings with some of South America's emerging powers were prickly.

Canada and the United States blocked an agreement at the Summit of the Americas to bring Cuba into the organization. That overrode support for Cuba from Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and others.

But the trade disputes that for years clouded the Canada-Brazil relationship are now far in the past and Canadian business has a keen eye trained on the burgeoning middle class of the Latin American powerhouse.

“From a strategic importance, it would rank with the top three or four countries in the world, I think, in terms of Canadian interests,” the Governor General said.

For Mr. Johnston, the trip is a chance to exercise what he calls the diplomacy of knowledge — the shared academic expertise that will lead to stronger trade ties and a more solid relationship between two countries.

Mr. Johnston says that while Canada has a mediocre record in attracting foreign students, Brazil is fertile ground.

He sees “a huge appetite in Brazil for Canadian education. To my great delight, Canada is the most favoured nation for Brazilians studying abroad.”

Last year, the Brazilian government announced funding for 75,000 scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students to study abroad. The private sector stepped up to finance an additional 26,000.

Canada wants a big piece of that program, Mr. Johnston said.

“We're anxious in Canada to obtain not only a good share of that, but to use that initiative to promote the diplomacy of knowledge between the two countries.”

International education is big business and there is huge potential for growth in Canada, said Paul Davidson, president of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and a driving force behind the Brazil trip.

Selling Canadian education to foreign students brings in more than $6.5-billion in annual revenue, he says.

But Canada trails other countries in this area.

“Canada has about half as many international students in our classrooms as the global standard,” Mr. Davidson said.

Foreign students make up about 15 per cent of the university population in most industrialized countries. In Canada, the proportion is about seven per cent, Mr. Davidson said.

But the trip is about more than luring the brightest prospects from emerging markets, said Mr. Johnston.

“You should always be conscious of that and not go to a country with a rapacious attitude that you're going to collect up their best students and bring them here,” he said.

Canadian universities hope to set up an exchange of students, as well as research and ideas, added Mr. Davidson.

For example, the delegation will visit a synchroton much like the one at the University of Saskatchewan, only newer, he said. A synchroton is a giant particle accelerator used in many areas of groundbreaking research.

The delegation includes 10 presidents from Canada's 15 major, research-oriented universities. Three parliamentary secretaries and three MPs from different parties are also in the group, along with Mr. Johnston's wife Sharon.

Mr. Johnston will meet Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, attend meetings and deliver speeches at a couple of conferences. After a week in Brazil, he will visit Barbados and then Trinidad and Tobago.