Speaking notes for the Honourable Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, at a Stakeholders’ Forum Hosted by The Alliance of Sector Councils & the Foreign Credentials Referral Office

To launch the Employer’s Roadmap: Hiring & Retaining Internationally Trained Workers

Ottawa, Ontario
June 16, 2009

As delivered

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Thank you very much, Corrine, who’s doing fantastic work as Director of the Foreign Credentials Referral Office, and Cheryl Paradowski, Chair of the Board of Directors of The Alliance of Sector Councils, for the invitation.  Thank you for the good work that all of your member organizations do. I’m pleased to see so many of you have taken time away from your work to discuss the benefits that newcomers bring, socially and economically, to help Canadian business succeed.

We can all be very proud of the fact that throughout our history, we’ve maintained a tradition of openness to newcomers from around the world. In fact, we are maintaining the highest relative level of immigration of any major developed country in the world. That presents both tremendous opportunities, obviously, but also certain challenges. For instance, we want to ensure that newcomers with professional and technical expertise can enter the circle of prosperity in our economy, are rapidly integrated into our society, and don’t stay on the sidelines. We don’t want a country whose immigration program leads to the kind of social exclusion and parallel communities we see in some other developed countries.

So far, we’ve been pretty good at this, but as we see the data over the past two decades of declining economic outcomes for newcomers in relative terms, this is definitely cause for concern, and obviously the issue of the recognition of the credentials of foreign-trained professionals is a central part of it.

Our government is committed to ensuring a future of prosperity for new Canadians. I’m talking particularly about those who often have left behind in their home countries significant prosperity.

Many of the foreign-trained professionals we attract to Canada are coming from the top social economic strata of their home societies, come to Canada and too often, because of either the Canadian experience paradox or the difficulty in getting credentials recognized, or both, find themselves under-employed in survival jobs.

And we need to acknowledge the risk that they’ve taken. Now, I’m pleased to report that last year, we welcomed an unprecedented 520,000 newcomers to Canada, if we include both permanent and temporary residents, the largest number of newcomers to arrive on our shores in our history. That includes more than 247,000 permanent residents and 193,000 temporary foreign workers and over 79,000 foreign students. And thanks to changes we made last year to our immigration program, we introduced the exciting new Canadian Experience Class to allow thousands of temporary workers and qualified foreign students to apply for permanent residency from right here in Canada.

I think this is a brilliant program. It’s not yet well known or much subscribed to, but it is the kind of thing we must be doing more of because it provides a pathway to permanent residency for people who are already, in a sense, pre-integrated into Canada. University students who have a degree that will be recognized in our universities who have, where necessary, improved their official languages skills or the more highly educated temporary foreign workers who, after two or three years working for an employer, already clearly understand the Canadian labour market, have that experience, and are often deeply valued by their employers. 

Of course, we all know that we’re facing a period of serious economic difficulty as we feel the effects of the global economic downturn. Having said that, we should be grateful that Canada has gone into global recession after every other major developed economy, and that everyone, from the World Bank to the IMF to the OECD, seems to predict that we will come out of it before any other major developed economy, and come out of it more strongly.

Now, most other developed countries have announced, and implemented for 2009, cuts in their planned levels of immigration, quite significant reductions. Canada, perhaps counter-intuitively, has essentially gone in the other direction. We are the only developed country I know that is maintaining our planned targets for immigration in 2009.

We think it would be short-sighted to cut levels, given the downturn, because there continue to be labour-market shortages in certain industries and in certain regions. And for those who are skeptical about that, I invite you to come with me to visit with employers in parts of Western Canada, for instance, who tell me if they can’t get access more quickly than they already do to temporary foreign workers, their businesses will go under.

So we believe that the worst thing the government could do, with respect to immigration during a downturn, would be to starve those businesses that are doing well of the labour they need to continue growing. And that’s one of the reasons, in the short term, we believe it’s responsible to maintain immigration levels, but we also believe that when we hit the recovery phase of this cycle, we will need well trained, new Canadians and newcomers to fill the jobs of the future.

Obviously in the long run, we have massive economic, rather demographic, challenges that we will be facing. By 2013, 100 percent of our labour-market growth will be attributable to immigration.

That’s why I announced last December that our government would receive more than 156,000 people in the economic category, maintaining our historic high levels of immigration. Now, since we adopted our Action Plan for Faster Immigration in 2008, part of our amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act included in the budget bill last year, for the first time in nearly a generation, we are seeing the waiting list for skilled foreign workers going down, rather than up. And I’m very excited about the progress we’ve made.

Our backlog of people in the skilled worker category, which had reached approximately 600,000 last year, had dropped to approximately 515,000 by the end of 2008 as a result of the actions that we took. That’s a significant drop of 15 percent, and as of April 30 this year, the backlog had dropped to 481,000 people, a further reduction of 7 percent. In less than a year after the introduction of our Action Plan, we’ve reduced the waiting list of skilled workers by 20 percent. And we’re continuing to make progress. I’m confident we’ll meet our targets. This means faster processing times, getting people to Canada more quickly.

One of the perverse consequences of the massive backlog that had developed was that average processing times for permanent residents were five to six years. A lot of people, by the time they got an acceptance letter, forgot they’d ever applied. 

Or if they were really ambitious immigrants at the top of their labour markets, they had moved on to competitors like Australia and New Zealand that were offering people an answer and permanent residency within a few months. We were taking ourselves out of the game in terms of international competition for many of the best and brightest in the migrant labour force.

Our Action Plan has two consequences. Those who applied since February of last year, who fall within 38 prioritized occupational categories, will get an answer within six to 12 months. That’s a far sight better than five to six years.

For new economic immigrants, we are back in the game to compete with other developed economies. And for those who applied before we made these changes, they’re going to have to wait longer, but the processing times are going down and that’s good news for them as well.

Now, the challenge for all of us is to ensure that newcomers don’t end up in the unemployment line, but instead move towards gainful employment, ideally in their own professions. To achieve this, we created in 2006 the Foreign Credentials Referral Office, which is doing tremendous work in partnership with Human Resources and Social Development Canada to help find faster and clearer pathways to credential recognition. We are providing people with information and making the pathways clearer and simpler.

As well, last January 16th, the Prime Minister fulfilled an election platform commitment to put the issue of credential recognition on the agenda of the First Ministers.

Because of the growing pressure from under-employed foreign-trained professionals, the federal and provincial governments came to an extremely important agreement to create a pan-Canadian Framework for credential recognition, with the first report in that respect to be issued by September of this year.

Not only did we exercise the leadership necessary to bring the provinces to the table on this, we also invested $50 million in the January Economic Action Plan over two years to support the work of federal, provincial and territorial officials who have been tasked with the development of this credential recognition framework.

We are working with the provinces and territories to see that newcomers get a clear understanding of how to get an answer on their application for credential recognition faster. Of course, we can and should never guarantee that 100 percent of foreign-trained professionals will have their credentials recognized in Canada. As I often say, we don’t want people who aren’t really engineers building our bridges or people who aren’t properly trained doctors doing surgery on our patients.

But what we owe these people, in my judgement, having invited them to Canada on the basis of their foreign training, is a clear and transparent pathway, not years and years of inscrutable red tape, along with an answer in a reasonable amount of time. I would hope the ultimate objective would be to have an answer within a year.

Now we all know the human stories. We all have our own anecdotes. A few months ago, I met in Edmonton a Syrian obstetrician-gynecologist who immigrated to Canada five years ago. She had done her medical training at one of the top Middle Eastern medical colleges, did her residency, delivered hundreds of babies, came to Canada with the hope of practising medicine here, and has been cleaning hotel rooms for the past five years.

Now, I can’t assess her credentials. Maybe she’s not properly trained, but this much I know. There’s no way she should be spending five years going through bureaucracy without a clear answer. So that’s one of the reasons we created the FCRO, to provide newcomers with the information they need to get their credentials recognized as quickly as possible.

It’s why the government has funded the Canadian Immigration Integration Project, with three pilot offices overseas in India, China and the Philippines. I visited the one in India, where they’re doing great work and we hopefully will be making an announcement about expanding the CIIP later this year.

Under this program, any skilled worker immigrating to Canada can participate in a free two-day seminar on foreign credential recognition processes and the Canadian labour market with private custom-tailored advice on settlement and integration issues. When these pilots end in 2010, the FCRO will continue to provide these services directly overseas. But to help newcomers move into what I call the circle of Canadian prosperity, we also need to support employers by giving them all the tools and resources they need.

That’s why today it gives me great pleasure to launch the Employer’s Roadmap on hiring and retaining internationally trained workers. Thanks to an effective partnership between the Foreign Credentials Referral Office and the Alliance of Sectoral Councils, this roadmap will help employers hire and retain international workers. So if you’re a small-to-medium-size employer, you’ll benefit from this roadmap. It explains how to assess and select international workers, how to integrate them into your organization by creating a welcoming environment once they’ve been hired. The roadmap also includes a comprehensive list of tools, programs and resources that may be helpful throughout the process.

Our ability to attract and integrate highly skilled workers is a source of Canada’s competitive advantage. Newcomers contribute the talent, commitment and diversity we need to build a strong Canada and a brighter future. At the same time, we need to continue to support you, the employers, to ensure you’re well equipped to hire and integrate these skilled workers into your workplaces. 

So thank you very much for your support, for your involvement, for your leadership and hopefully working together, we will realize the true potential of the tens of thousands of people who come to build their futures here in Canada, to build with us and your organizations our shared prosperity. Thank you.