Speaking Notes for The Hon. Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism to the 2009 Top Employer Summit “Helping Newcomers to Enter the Workforce”

Fairmont Royal York Hotel
Toronto, Ontario
November 19, 2009

As delivered

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Thank you very much, Tony.

It’s a real pleasure to be here at this important employers summit, which is doing groundbreaking work to share best practices and celebrate the achievements of great Canadians employers who are creating wealth in this country and opportunity, and who are leading the way in what is the most successful economies in the world.

We can be proud of Canada’s achievements as we go through this difficult year, the most difficult year in the global economy since the Great Depression. We can all be proud of the fact that Canada entered this global economic downturn after virtually every other major, developed economy in the world and, by most accounts, we are moving back into a growth cycle ahead of most other developed countries with a stronger fiscal situation and a more competitive economy.

That is, in no small part, thanks to the great work done by the employers in this room and other innovators across the country. So it’s a real pleasure to be here, in part because my department obviously represents, in many ways, the future of Canada’s labour market and the future, more broadly, of our country.

We know that, with the demographic changes that will soon start to take hold, within a few years one hundred percent of Canada’s labour market growth and net population growth will be attributable to immigration. In this city, that’s probably already the case. So there is no future for Canada as a country of increasing prosperity without a robust immigration program – an immigration program that works for newcomers and works for the Canadian economy at the same time.

That’s our objective and that’s where you come in. As employers, it’s so critically important that you benefit from the strengths and skills, experience and training of new Canadians, and at the same time, it’s hugely important to the success of Canada’s very ambitious immigration policy and model of diversity that major employers open up the doors of opportunity to foreign-trained professionals and those who come here with a tremendous work ethic, with hope and… hopes and dreams for success for them and their children.

So I want to commend the organizers of the Top 100. In particular I’d like to commend your organization for partnering with Citizenship and Immigration Canada in creating the Top Employers for New Canadians category. I’d like to congratulate all of those who are the 25 being honoured in that category this year for the great example that they have set for others across the country.

One of the things that concerns me as Minister of Immigration, when I look at the data from over the past couple of decades, is we have seen a decline in economic outcomes for newcomers, a higher unemployment rate.

Foreign-born Canadians with university degrees have a unemployment rate three times higher than native-born Canadians with degrees. We’ve seen incomes go down for newcomers to Canada and very serious challenges, in terms of economic integration – most notably through the problems that we have with foreign credential recognition – with 20 percent of economic immigrants to Canada who fall within the licensed professions.

As you know, they have great challenges in having their foreign degrees and qualifications recognized by the relevant licensing bodies here in Canada. And if they’re not within those categories of those professions, almost all newcomers find themselves stuck in the Canadian experience paradox, as I call it: no Canadian job without Canadian experience; no Canadian experience without a Canadian job.

So we end up with the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of highly trained, very bright, eager new Canadians who are underemployed. To some extent, that’s inevitable, that some people will face a lag time, an integration gap as they first get here. To some extent, it’s perhaps inevitable that some will find themselves in so-called transition jobs for a certain period of time. But we need to make sure that those people have an opportunity to transition into jobs for which they’re properly trained and qualified as soon as possible. And that’s why I’m here today – to encourage you to work with us, at all levels of government and in the non-profit sector – in opening up those doors of opportunity.

We are maintaining the most ambitious immigration program in the world. It’s quite an experiment, if you think about it. Canada is receiving 0.8 percent of its population in new, permanent residents every year. That’s the highest level of immigration intake in the developed world, in relative terms. And now, in the midst of the global economic downturn, as labour markets have tightened, most other developed countries have actually reduced their targets for immigration. I just saw that coming out of the United States and Britain just made an announcement last week. Australia has done the same, as have many western European countries. Canada, virtually alone in the developed world, has said that, even in the face of a tighter labour market in this global downturn, we are maintaining these extraordinarily ambitious levels of immigration.

Now, that may be counterintuitive to you. Some would say, well, you know, Mr. Kenney, why did you just announce that in 2010 Canada will continue to target for as many as 265,000 new permanent residents?

The answer is because we see, in immigration, the pathway to our future prosperity. We believe that Canada should be planning for the mid to long range, and not calculating policy based on knee-jerk reactions to short-term economic conditions. And when you look at the demographic changes that lie ahead, when we look at the massive labour market shortages that will once again become a serious problem when we move back into the growth portion of the economic cycle, then people will realize that we need talented and hard-working newcomers to fill the jobs of the future.

Before this downturn took effect, for instance, in the two western-most provinces, Alberta and British Columbia, the Human Resources Department estimated that by 2020 there would be a labour market shortage in those two provinces of over 600,000 positions. I can tell you I still meet employers in certain industries and regions of this country whose largest challenge is a labour market shortage. So what we need to do is to continue this ambitious immigration program, to ensure that it results in better economic outcomes for newcomers – so that we more closely align our immigration intake with the labour market needs that actually exist – and we invest more in ensuring that people are trained up to the jobs that are available and able to use the education that they have.

Let me tell you how we’ve been trying to do just that. First of all, last year our government introduced what we call our Action Plan for Faster Immigration, wherein we have telescoped the Federal Skilled Worker Program – the main current of economic immigration to Canada that’s popularly known as the point system.

We haven’t reduced the target of economic immigrants coming to Canada, but what we’ve done is to say look, there used to be over 400 occupational categories where people would qualify to come here as skilled workers. We’ve telescoped that down to 38 occupations that we have determined, following extensive consultations, are in greatest need in the national labour market.

Now, this allows us to control the intake and thereby reduce the huge backlog that has developed over the years. But most importantly, we have now… we are now able to give people an indication… an initial indication on their application to immigrate to Canada within a few weeks, and a final answer within a few months. Before we brought in the Action Plan it was taking six years. So Australia and New Zealand were giving people an answer in six to eight months; we were giving them an answer in five or six years. We weren’t competing for the best and the brightest; once again we are. And that’s a tremendous step forward. We’ve reduced the backlog in that category of economic immigrants by a third in the past year, and are providing much faster processing so that we can compete for many of the best and brightest.

We’ve also worked with the provinces to expand something known as the Provincial Nominee Programs, which I think are a tremendous step forward. One of the biggest problems we’ve had with immigration in the past was that 85 percent of newcomers settled in three big cities, even though many of the most important labour market needs were in the regions of Canada and outside the three biggest cities. Now, with the Provincial Nominee Programs, we work with employers and with provinces to identify the newcomers for pre-arranged jobs, typically in a Provincial Nominee Program. So there’s very little gap time for someone who arrives through that program. It now means, practically speaking, that Manitoba, which was only receiving a couple of thousand immigrants, say, a decade ago, is now receiving over 9000 in a very robust labour market. And most of those people who are arriving are, at least in theory, working in a job commensurate to their skills and education the very next week.

I mention this as an advertisement to you because I want to encourage you, depending on the province you’re in, to consider partnering with your province through the Provincial Nominee Program, because it helps you select the newcomer that’s appropriate, that has the right skills and experience and that helps them to get an immediate head start in the Canadian job market.

We’ve also allowed the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to expand according to demand. This is a program that gets some criticism, but the reality is the program is a reflection of labour market shortages in Canada. We do not approve a work permit for someone to come as temporary worker unless and until that position has been offered to a Canadian for some period of time. I can tell you there are thousands of employers who would have to shut their doors and close their businesses if they didn’t have access to these hard-working folks who come and benefit from that program, save for themselves and send money to their families.

Most important, we have now opened the door to many of those individuals to permanent residency in Canada through the new Canadian Experience Class, which provides a pathway to permanent residency for qualified temporary workers and to foreign students. The Prime Minister has significantly increased the number of foreign students coming to our colleges and universities, and he’s highlighted that in his recent trip to India. We’re now telling those foreign students, if you come to Canada, get a Canadian degree, during which time you’ve improved your language skills if necessary, and you now have a degree that will be recognized by all the employers in this room, we will give you a pathway to quick permanent residency from within the country, rather than having to ridiculously leave, apply, and wait for six years to come here. So these are some of the ways that we are improving the immigration program and making sure that there’s a pool of new workers that are more relevant to the needs that you have as employers.

But that’s not enough, because we know from the data that one of the single largest reasons why foreign-trained professionals have a hard time getting job offers in Canada is because of the issue of language proficiency. Compass Research did a survey of major employers, and they indicated that the single largest reason why they were not hiring more new Canadians was language proficiency. That’s why our government has tripled the federal investment in integration, settlement and language training – programs with free English and French courses for newcomers to Canada. And we’re innovating within that program with, for instance, a pilot project on vouchers that empowers the newcomer with a voucher that they can shop around and find the best service amongst the language training agencies. So we’re hopefully going to be increasing the language capability of new permanent residents to Canada.

But that’s not enough. More and more we are convinced that we should be helping people to get a head start in that integrating into Canada before they even get off the plane. And that’s why, in part, we created the Foreign Credential Referral Office and, through it, the Canadian Immigration Integration Project, which has been very capably managed in India, Philippines and China by the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, and we’d like to thank them for their great work.

This is a tremendous program that is offering free two-day seminars and some private counselling to preselected federal skilled workers that allows them and their dependents to come in and to understand how do they get the process started in applying for credential recognition. It deals with questions such as: How can they get a job lined up in Canada? What does the housing market look like in the city they’re planning to move to? Can they establish a residence before they arrive here? How do they apply for their health card, their driver’s license, and get the kids enrolled in school?

I met with some of our graduates from this program in New Delhi in January, and they were absolutely delighted to have this huge burden lifted off their shoulders. They knew where they were going. Many of them had secured jobs. They were months ahead of the process of credential recognition. And so they are arriving with an enormous head start, rather than walking off the plane, metaphorically, into a wall of challenges, in terms of integration. And we’ll be making some interesting announcements about expanding that program in the near future.

Finally, we’re taking important steps with the provinces to accelerate credential recognition for foreign-trained professionals. You know that this is a long-standing problem. It’s a sad joke that Canada has the best-educated taxi drivers in the world. And you’ve all met those engineers and PhDss who are security guards and convenience store clerks and taxicab drivers. That’s not what the promise of immigration is supposed to be about in Canada.

The challenge is, in this complicated federation, that the federal government principally is responsible for inviting the people here through the immigration program, often on the basis of their skills and education, and then the provinces are responsible for regulating the professions. Now, get this. In each province there are more than 40 licensing bodies and over 400 professional agencies in Canada, with a patchwork of regulations and procedures. So a newcomer arrives here, and they have a hard time figuring out where to start, often.

What we did in 2006 was that our government created the Foreign Credential Referral Office. It is, in part, providing the pre-integration services for folks abroad. And together with the Human Resources Ministry, we are working with many of the more progressive licensing bodies to simplify the information, get it out to people. We’ve set up a huge web portal. If you are an immigrant been selected in Korea, and you’re going to come to Canada as a medical doctor, you can now go on line, find out in which province the procedures that exist for applying for licensing and you can begin the process in advance. And we’re trying to get those licensing bodies to work together, identify best practices and streamline the whole process.

But that kind of jargon doesn’t really satisfy people who are under-employed, people like a woman I met in Edmonton, a Syrian-trained medical doctor who had delivered thousands of babies in her country of origin, came to Canada, and has been cleaning hotel rooms for the past five years.

That’s why it’s very important that in January of this year the Prime Minister led the ten Premiers to create, for the first time, an agreement, to a national labour market with rationalized regulatory standards for all of the professions from coast to coast. That’s the first thing. You know, in the European Union, you could be a veterinarian from Poland and move to Portugal and practice the next day, but you can’t do that moving from Ontario to Quebec. So that’s the first thing. We’ve also got an agreement from the premiers to finally resolve that issue.

Secondly, this agreement creates a pan-Canadian approach to foreign credential recognition, the goal of which will be to give people a clear, transparent process so they can get an answer within a year of their application for credential recognition. We can’t guarantee everyone a yes, and nor should we. We don’t want improperly qualified engineers building bridges, or people who aren’t properly trained surgeons, opening up patients. But we do owe all applicants a transparent and reasonably quick process, and that’s what we’re working on.

Finally, there’s all of the great work that’s being done by professional agencies, many that our department supports, to encourage major employers to open up the door of opportunity for new Canadians through mentorship programs. And this is something I’m trying to get us to emulate in Ottawa, through the federal public service. It’s a little more difficult, a lot more rules, but I can tell you in our own ministry we’ve actually been providing an opportunity for some very bright, young refugees who arrived in Canada to work at our ministry in internships, and many of them have then flipped into full-time employment.

I’m also the Minister for Multiculturalism and I really believe this is the way forward in terms of multiculturalism. I have often said multiculturalism should no longer be about the sort of superficial celebration of diversity. We all embrace our diversity. It’s an irreversible, positive factor of our society. But we need now to be very deliberate in Canada about helping people to succeed in this country economically and to integrate culturally and socially, while also maintaining pride in their background and  getting to know people from other backgrounds.

In the Multiculturalism Program, the program about which I am most proud, is a opportunity we’ve created for the children of Somali refugees here in Toronto, to get mentorship and internship and apprenticeship opportunities in professions typically, but not exclusively, owned by folks in the Jewish community. So you’ve got people from a Muslim community mixing with folks from the Jewish community, both of them learning to like and respect one another. The young people are getting professional experience for the very first time and I can tell you many of the professionals are benefiting enormously from this program.

This is not complicated. It is realizing that there are people who may not be perfectly fluent in English or French, who may not have degrees from universities whose names we recognize, but who typically have an amazing work effort and who, if given the chance, can do tremendous things in your companies.

I want to thank you all for the contributions that you are making, and I want to encourage you to continue working with our ministry.

Amongst other things we’ve published the Employer’s Road Map on Hiring and Retaining Internationally Trained Workers. It brings together a lot of what I’ve just talked about and I think is a useful link, especially to the government programs that can be there to assist you in helping to open up the kind of prosperity that we enjoy to the people who come here with hopes and dreams for a brighter future.

Thank you for being part of that.