Kenney announces upgrades to program aimed at attracting world's talent

Permanent Resident Card (2002-2007) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

STEVEN CHASE
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail


Canada has just welcomed its 20,000th permanent resident under a four-year-old immigration program that’s on track to become this country’s premier method for recruiting newcomers.

The Canadian Experience Class, launched only a few years ago, represents the future of Canada’s immigration system – one where the Harper government puts a hard-nosed emphasis on attracting the best and brightest skilled workers.


The program targets temporary foreign workers already in Canada and non-Canadians who have graduated from universities and colleges here – people who have proven they can integrate into society and meet labour market needs.

It removes immigration obstacles for a class of individuals that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney calls "the most likely to succeed."

The 20,000th permanent resident admitted through the four-year-old program is Gaurav Gore, originally from India.

He earned a master’s in business administration from the Unversity of Toronto, a program he began in 2008, and is applying his learning as a consultant with a major bank in Canada’s largest city.

Each year about 300,000 people such as Mr. Gore arrive in Canada. About 100,000 students and 200,000 temporary workers flood into this country annually – a group the Conservatives feel offers the best prospects for new immigrants.

“Mr. Gore completed a challenging, competitive university program,” Mr. Kenney said in a statement Friday. “He is now building a successful career, contributing to our economy and helping create jobs for Canadians here in Canada. Gaurav is exactly the sort of skilled worker that Canada hopes to attract and retain.”

The program fast tracks permanent residency applications for skilled foreign workers and graduate students who have spent time in Canada on temporary permits or student visas – those who can demonstrate they are proficient in either English or French.

Before it was created, highly-skilled outsiders could not become permanent residents from within Canada. Would-be applicants such as Mr. Gore would previously be told they had to return to their country of origin and wait at the back of a queue for about seven or eight years.

Under the new program, applicants can apply from within Canada and expect a quicker decision, normally within one year.

This type of economic immigrant class, unveiled three years ago, was the first new avenue to obtaining a permanent residency card in decades.

Upgrades to the program, announced by Mr. Kenney Friday, will make it easier for applicants to qualify for entry under the Canadian Experience Class.

All applicants will now require 12 months of Canadian work experience gained in the three years prior to their application. Previously, some needed 24 months experience.

This change will make it easier for international student graduates to apply for permanent residency under the program.

Canada was forced to bring in the new program because of a global race for talent with rival destinations such as Australia and the United Kingdom, which had similar programs.

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The coming storm: 9 million retiring Baby Boomers in Canada

The Baby Boomers’ 50th birthday 3 (Photo credit: Christchurch City Libraries)

Jonathan Chevreau, Financial Post · Jul. 14, 2011 | Last Updated: Jul. 20, 2011 7:23 AM ET

Perhaps it’s just as well Baby Boomers enjoyed a taste of retirement when they tuned in and dropped out in the 1960s. Most have been working ever since and — apart from the exceptions who enjoy spectacular entrepreneurial success — seem fated to work well into old age.

A Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce poll this week found only half of Canadian Boomers aged 45 to 64 have regular savings programs in place. And a TD Waterhouse survey found 31% of retirees aged 55 to 70 are spending more in retirement than expected.

Those who neither save nor have old-fashioned employer-provided defined-benefit pensions seem destined to toil at least until the traditional retirement age of 65. Many may opt for 70, since by waiting the extra five years, annual benefits paid out by the Canada Pension Plan will be 42% higher.

That’s assuming you can even find a place to toil in this depressingly stagnant economy. There’s an emerging trend called “unretirement,” as practised by — here’s a term you may not yet have encountered — “workampers.” That’s a contraction of “work camping,” which refers to an increasingly popular practice whereby aging Baby Boomers sell their principal residences and hit the road, often in recreational vehicles.

Couples or families travel across America and work a few days or weeks at or near minimum wage and/or exchange their labour for a place to stay (or a place to park the RV), according to Steve Anderson, president of Arkansas-based Possibilities Workamper News.

For Workampers, home is where the RV is and the RV is parked wherever they can generate short-term cash. Jobs include gigs at parks, fisheries, amusement parks, hotels and even high-tech giants like Amazon.com.

It seems we’ve come full circle with a lifestyle similar to what the first wave of Boomers enjoyed in their youth, when they lived in communes or rainbow-coloured minibuses in the psychedelic ’60s. For movie buffs, this may conjure up Jack Nicholson’s About Schmidt, where the veteran actor plays a widowed retired actuary who hits the road in a Winnebago.

Actuaries are shrewd about pensions and retirement, which is why we’re hearing from a lot of them in the current round of pension reform debates. The focus is on impecunious Baby Boomers, judging by a 2010 Liberal white paper entitled Canadian Pension Security, Adequacy and Coverage: Public Policy Challenges and the Baby Boom Generation.

“The undeniable fact is that, over the next 20 to 30 years, Canadian pension regimes will face a perfect storm of an aging population and longer life spans,” it says.

The storm analogy is not misplaced. Many Boomers have failed to batten down the hatches in anticipation of the coming 3-D hurricane of demographics, debt and deficit. The term 3-D hurricane has been popularized by Research Affiliates’ chief investment officer, Jason Hsu. He says the ‘new normal’ is an extended period of lower economic and return expectations for the aging and debt-ridden developed world.

The height of the Boomer retirement cycle in the United States will be 2025, Hsu says, at which point there will be 10 new retirees for each new entrant to the workforce. In 1970, the ratio was closer to 5 to 1.

Boomers should have anticipated these untenable support ratios looming in their old age and saved aggressively in their working years by delaying pre-retirement consumption. But of course, “what we observe today is inadequate retirement savings.”

Hsu frets there are not enough young workers to keep pay-as-you-go Social Security (in the United States) afloat. Employer pensions and forced retirement savings should have protected workers from the demographics of aging but employers have been dismantling DB pensions while Boomers have not embraced voluntary savings as much as they should have.

As we’ve seen in France, Greece and other countries, these tensions are spilling over.

“Serious problems arise when countries have become so indebted that they are unable to raise debt to bail out retirees who have, by and large, undersaved.”

Canada is twice blessed in having largely dodged the 2008-2009 financial crisis and in the fact the CPP was put on a firm footing in the 1990s. While partly pay-as-you-go, CPP is strong enough that in the recent election, the NDP and the Liberal Party both advocated expanding it.

However, the ruling Conservatives are not committed to a “big CPP” beyond perhaps a “modest” enhancement of the system. In an interview this week with Ted Menzies, the Minister of State (Finance), I could get no precise definition of “modest” except that it’s well below the doubling of CPP benefits some have called for.

In a recent article in this paper, the Fraser Institute’s Neil Mohindra warned against using a battering ram to swat a fly. Once interest rates move back to their higher historical levels, he believes Canadians will be able to save more, borrow less and buy annuities with much better payouts.

Still, there’s little doubt the self-employed and workers in small businesses need help setting up employer pensions resembling those enjoyed by employees in large corporations and government.

True to their roots, the Conservatives prefer a private-sector, market-oriented defined-contribution pension model that will be managed by the nation’s banks, fund companies and insurance companies. It’s called pooled retirement pension plan, or PRPP.

With a four-year electoral mandate, the Harper administration has plenty of time to implement this program and prove it’s serious about closing the retirement income gap. Whether the PRPP arrives in time to save the Boomers remains to be seen. Until then, my general advice to them is: “Don’t quit your day job.”

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Joe O’Connor: Canada’s baby blip won’t save us from skyrocketing health-care costs

Film poster for Baby Boom - Copyright 1987, United Artists (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tuesday was my daughter’s first birthday, a celebration that kicked-off at about 5:20 a.m. A few hours later, Statistics Canada reassured us we were not alone in our bleary-eyed joy.

The 2011 census offered us a showstopper of a statistic, a number that injects new life into our greying population while shattering the notion that Canadians are not having kids anymore.

We are having kids, lots of kids. The number of Canadian tots aged four and under increased by 11% between 2006 and 2011, a baby boom not seen since the Baby Boom.

Boom 2.0 marks the highest five-year rate of growth among the Mini-me crowd since 1956 to 1961.


And the birthing trend is national in scope. Fertility rates nudged to within a whisker of 1.7 kids per family, up from 1.5 in 2001.

Albertans, with a robust economy and young families aplenty, are the nation’s most productive reproducers with a birth rate of 1.8, reflected by a 20.9% jump among kids under four.



Saskatchewan (19.6%) and Quebec (17.5 %) are likewise beefing up on tots.

Why the boom? Demographics. Baby Boomers’ kids, the so-called Echoes, may not have jobs for life but they have a zest for creating new life and an army of potential new Moms to do it. The number of women in the 21-34 age bracket is ballooning, a numeric reality any parent hoping to secure a daycare slot in a major Canadian city without putting their name on a waiting list at the moment of conception can fill you in on.

There is more at play here, though, a deeper societal shift, a reawakening of a yearning to go forth and multiply. It ebbed away in the 1960s when women joined the workforce in ever-greater numbers, the cost of living increased and family photos featuring three or four or more kids became the preserve of the rich and the nanny-supported, or poorer immigrant families bound by custom and kept afloat by social welfare.

“Women were doing more paid work, so they didn’t have time to have children,” Roderic Beaujot, a demographer at the University of Western Ontario, said. “Having children has become more positive.”

And practical. Things like parental leave, $7-a-day daycares in Quebec, RESPs and the Universal Child Care Benefit have softened the economic blow of feeding a growing brood. Another factor is the changing nature of work.



“With the way that technology is advancing, it is increasingly easy to seek out alternative work arrangements like working from home, starting your own online business, and so on,” says Amber Strocel, a Vancouver-based writer/Mommy blogger. “With more flexibility around work-life balance, it becomes easier to have children. The same technology also makes it easier to stay connected with friends and family, which means a better support network.

“That also makes it easier to have children.”

Doug Norris, the former director of social and demographic statistics with Statistics Canada, cautions against reading too much into the numbers. We are getting older, he says, not younger as a country, and our current baby blip is a passing bump, an accident of demography that will not save us from our greying selves — from skyrocketing healthcare costs — postponed retirement parties and underfunded Canadian pension plans.

“In 20 years, one in four of us is still going to be up over the age of 65 almost inevitably,” he says. “There would have to be a substantial increase in the fertility rate and I don’t see that coming.”

Instead of taking over, Canada’s army of tots appears to be just passing through town. Marching through the statistics, celebrating first birthdays, making mornings foggily perfect for a new generation of Moms and Dads.

National Post, with files from news services
• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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