Speaking notes for The Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism

At the 2010 Top 100 Employers Summit
Toronto, Ontario, November 1, 2010

As delivered

Thank you very much Tony. Bonjour tout le monde. Good morning. I am delighted to join you today. I have to say that when I saw that this was happening at the Four Seasons and you had Sidney Poitier and Measha Brueggergosman I thought this was a Toronto International Film Festival event.

This is a really impressive and exciting line up that you have and Citizenship and Immigration Canada, as part of the government of Canada, is delighted to participate in sponsoring part of the focus of the Top Employers conference on the need to ensure accessibility in the Canadian labour market to newcomers because that is essential to our current and future prosperity.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to imagine that it’s 2031. Our working population is now supporting a retired population twice its size and tensions are under strain. Yet a significant number of critical positions needed to support our population and maintain our economy and social services remain unfilled. Some Canadians are unable to find a family doctor. Hospitals are in need of more nurses to tend to an aging and increasingly healthcare dependent population. Employers are unable to fill skilled positions in almost any sector.

Immigrants arrive in Canada with degrees and experience in skilled occupations such as medicine or engineering yet many are still unable to fill the critical positions our labour force desperately needs. It isn’t because they are unqualified or they don’t have the skills these positions demand. It’s just that they are unable to transfer their international education and experience into Canadian workplaces in a timely way.

As you know, this situation is already a reality for many newcomers in regulated occupations in Canada. Immigrants already comprise one in every four new labour force entrants. Quite soon the number of new labour market entrants from within Canada will fall below the number of people retiring from the labour force.

Our workforce will shrink without immigration and immigration will account for all of our labour force growth within the next five years. If we don’t begin to address the real barriers that prevent newcomers from entering their chosen profession in Canada, we actually risk a future where their current predicament could potentially have serious consequences for our country.

The prospect would be a country with significant and deepening labour market shortages and a large body of foreign trained professionals who are chronically under-employed. That makes no sense for either Canada or for newcomers. I’m not here to paint a bleak picture of our future. Rather my purpose is to present the cold hard facts that can no longer be denied.

Our population is aging. Our birth rate is declining and our labour force will not grow on its own. We need to ensure that the immigrants we bring in can contribute to our labour market in the most efficient way possible. At the same time we must remember that Canada isn’t alone in this situation by any means. Most other western democracies will soon be confronted with the challenges of a shrinking domestic labour pool and will also need to rely on immigration in order to fill labour force gaps.

Canada must ensure that it’s in a position to compete for the world’s best and brightest. How can we do that?  First we need to ensure that newcomers are able to work in Canada soon after their arrival. It’s equally important that they’re able to work in the fields for which they are trained.

Ladies and gentlemen, we all have a role to play in helping new Canadians make the transition into our workplace. This isn’t only to help newcomers succeed. It just makes great business sense. We don’t want to lose some of the world’s best employees to our competitors in other countries.

Also in a global economy having a global workforce just makes sense. Two of the biggest hurdles that immigrants face in getting a good job in their field of expertise are either a lack of Canadian work experience or a Canadian degree or both. As a result most newcomers find themselves stuck in what we call the Canadian experience paradox. If they haven’t had a Canadian job they don’t have experience. If they don’t have experience they have a hard time getting a Canadian job.

I’m here today to challenge you in the broader employer sector to reverse this trend and to consider doing more to hire newcomers in your workplace. Before your role comes in, newcomers are first confronted with the challenge presented by Canada’s complicated process for licensing of professional bodies.

With more than 400 licensing bodies in Canada you can imagine how daunting this challenge must be for newcomers. There are about 45 regulated professions. They exist in each province, times ten. You’re talking about well over 400 licensing bodies, each with their own often very complicated procedures for credential recognition.

So newcomers really don’t know where to begin in this maze of red tape or who to contact in order to get their credentials recognized. We can’t blame them for that. Newcomers shouldn’t need to jump through hoops or wait for several years before their foreign degrees and credentials are given a serious look by the licensing bodies here in Canada.

Part of the challenge also stems from how our federation is organized. While the federal government is responsible for selecting immigrants based on their skills, official language abilities and education, the provinces are responsible for regulating professions and ultimately deciding whether newcomers are qualified to work.

Foreign-trained workers in regulated occupations must now typically wait several years before they are given a pathway to get their credentials recognized. While there is no simple solution to the problem of foreign credential recognition – and believe me if there was there are strong incentives for people at the political level and the bureaucratic level to solve it – we do hope to address some of these jurisdictional issues through our ongoing work with our partners, the provinces and territories.

In January of 2009 we took a huge step forward on this. Prime Minister Harper had a First Ministers Meeting with the ten Premiers and put on the agenda for the first time this vexatious issue of credential recognition and said to the provinces, look, not only do you have problems in labour market mobility within Canada for regulated professions but we have these sometimes seemingly impenetrable barriers for newcomers to Canada. We need to streamline and simplify and rationalize the process across Canada.

So they signed an agreement in the beginning of 2009 to come up with a pan Canadian, a national strategy for clearer, simpler, rationalized rules for the process of credential recognition. That was then funded in our 2009 budget with a $50 million investment through Canada’s Economic Action Plan, which allowed us to work out the details with the provinces and last November to launch what we call the Pan Canadian Framework for the Assessment and Recognition of Foreign qualifications.

The point of this is concrete work is being done in regulated professions to make the process simpler, faster and to rationalize the process right across the federation. Because of this framework we will soon be able to provide foreign trained workers with a decision as to whether their qualifications will be recognized in Canada within a year of their application.

Perhaps to some people that doesn’t sound like great progress but believe me in many of these professions the process is taking 3, 4 or 5 years if not longer. In December processes will be in place for eight regulated occupations – of the 40some regulated professions we’ve begun with eight where the licensing bodies have indicated their willingness to work with governments on this. That includes registered nurses, engineers and pharmacists.

We expect to add another six occupations to this list of streamlined credential recognition by December of 2012. We’re doing a lot of other things as well to engage different professions. To give you one example, Health Canada is also working with the provinces and territories to pilot a national assessment process for international medical graduates in Canada looking to enter into residencies.

These are significant steps forward to ensuring processes are fair, consistent, transparent and above all timely. As I mentioned, Canada’s Economic Action Plan invested $50 million in order to continue our work with the provinces on this new approach. We’re doing a lot of other interesting programs. I’ll just give you one example.

In Edmonton I met a medical doctor trained in Syria, an obstetrician. She was trained there, delivered hundreds of babies, moved to Canada with a dream of becoming a practicing physician here and has instead been cleaning hotel rooms for the past six years. That’s the human tragedy of this. The woman was in tears when she explained to me her sense of humiliation and struggle and disappointment.

In a sense there’s too many people like that to whom we sell the dream of working in their profession in Canada implicitly through our immigration process but for whom the dream has turned out to be a disappointment. We must do what we can to open up the doors of opportunity for women and men like that.

I met her in the context of a program we were launching in Edmonton to give foreign trained physicians like her who had for various reasons been unable to obtain their licensing through the medical college, the physicians’ college, training on how to become paramedics in Canada.   We took a group of 40 foreign trained physicians there in Edmonton, training them on the technical aspects of working as a paramedic in Canada so they could at least get their foot into the labour market in the medical profession, develop some Canadian work experience, learn some of the different Canadian specific aspects of patient care, and also have the emotional and professional satisfaction of at least working with patients.

We are funding and piloting programs like that right across the spectrum of regulated professions. Having said that, Canadians certainly don’t want us to lower Canadian standards. They don’t want people who aren’t up to the Canadian standard as engineers building our bridges. They don’t want people operating on us who aren’t properly trained surgeons.

We can’t ask the licensing bodies to reduce their requirements and that’s not what this is about. It’s about having a streamlined and reasonably quick process for credential recognition. If their qualifications don’t measure up to Canadian standards, at least we can tell them how much additional training they might need or if they might want to look into work in a similar field where they still might be able to apply their skills and experience.

Since the federal government doesn’t have primary responsibility for credential recognition we’re also trying to do our part by helping newcomers to find the information they need on the process. We’re giving them a head start through many programs.

Let me tell you how we’ve been trying to do just that. I’m sure some of you already know about the Foreign Credentials Referral Office (FCRO) that our government created in 2007 with an investment of some $37 million led by our very competent Director General Corrine Prince-St-Amand who is here with us and we have an information booth outside.

The FCRO provides information to selected newcomers and prospective economic immigrants on how to begin the process of credential recognition. Members of the FCRO team are here today and, as I said, I invite you to visit them at the kiosk outside where you’ll find all sorts of useful information, including a roadmap for employers on hiring and retaining foreign trained professionals. We launched the roadmap at this conference last year.

We also believe the way of improving the economic outcomes for newcomers is to give them better advice and information on the process to recognize their credentials in Canada before they arrive, to give them a head start. This is why we’ve invested in something called the Canadian Immigration Integration Project funded by us and run on our behalf by the Association of Canadian Community Colleges.

It provides newcomers with critical information on how to get a head start on the credential recognition process while they’re still overseas. The program has already helped more than 9,000 professionals in the federal skilled worker category with personal orientation services. We do this in India, China and the Philippines. We’re now expanding it to much of Europe, including the Gulf States through our mission in London, and we have a similar program run by a great settlement organization in Vancouver called S.U.C.C.E.S.S. in Taiwan and Korea.

We’re now covering about 80% of the economic immigrants who come to Canada to have access to this pre-orientation. I’ve visited with our newcomers who’ve been selected in Beijing, in Manila, in New Delhi who have benefited from this program. It’s great. They sit down. They get a little bit of personal counselling: what province are you planning to go to, what’s your profession, what are your expectations. Then we help to give them a road map.

We encourage them over the course of a two day free seminar to apply online to the licensing body, how they can do a job search while they’re still in their country, before arriving in Canada. We have seen real success as a result of the program.

My department also recently invested another $50 million over three years, as I say, to expand this service to other jurisdictions in Europe and the Middle East as well as to expand it to provincial nominees. There’s a category of immigrants that are increasingly populating the western and Atlantic provinces.

As part of the Economic Action Plan this government is also innovating in ways we learn and talk about issues related to the recognition of foreign credentials. For example, next month we’ll launch the International Qualifications Network website, a tool that will help our partners, including employers like yourselves, to share success stories and help you to advance your foreign credential assessment or recognition needs. We ask you to contact us if you’d like to participate in that.

To ensure our immigration program continues to meet out labour market needs, governments must continue to invest in programs that guarantee people are properly trained for their chosen professions, and that they are able to use their skills and knowledge in the Canadian workplace soon after their arrival.

More importantly governments must first select skilled workers that are most likely to integrate and to succeed in the labour market. That’s our responsibility.  Today just as a heads up, I’ll be tabling in Parliament our Immigration Plan for 2011 which will indicate that 60% of our newcomers will be coming through economic streams of immigration. Overall about 20% of the newcomers we select will be assessed for their human capital, the balance typically being dependents, and other family members in our humanitarian programs.

Over the past few years there have been signs of improvement in the way that we select some of these newcomers and this is really encouraging because the data from roughly the late 1970’s until the beginning of this past decade indicated declining outcomes for newcomers – lower incomes, higher unemployment and some real challenges. But we have some new data which indicates that newcomers selected since roughly 2002, when the government put in place a new selection grid, are getting much better access to the labour market because we have a higher level of language skills, education and experience.

I’m pleased to report that as a result of the changes that we’ve made federal skilled workers are now earning 65% higher incomes in their first year than did people selected under the old system. The Conference Board of Canada recently released a study that found immigrants are also having a major impact on innovation and performance on every level, in areas such as research, culture, business and global commerce.

The study found that at least 35% of an estimated 1,800 Canada research chairs are foreign born, even though immigrants are just one fifth of the Canadian population. Once the government has done its part, its then up to employers and the private sector to then open the door of opportunity to all Canadians, including those who have newly arrived.

I know that many of you here today have already taken the steps necessary to make your workplaces more diverse. I believe, and I’m sure you agree, that more can still be done. As an example last year the federal government launched the Federal Internship for Newcomers Program. It provides opportunities for young newcomers to work in internships in eight departments.

It’s a very encouraging program. We started it actually in my Ministry helping young refugees who came to Canada, went to Canadian colleges, an opportunity to come and work as interns in my Ministry. Many are then wining competitions for full time placements in the public sector.

While I’d like to take credit for this innovation the reality is that the public sector as usual is following the lead of the private sector. Great organizations like TRIEC here in Toronto really innovated and started this process. I’m pleased to report that the majority of employers who had hired foreign trained workers indicated that they are either meeting or exceeding their expectations.

The Conference Board of Canada recommends that employers hire immigrants at all levels of their organization, including leadership roles to match the diversity of its workplace with its clients. I’d like to add to this that it is also your responsibility to ensure that the positive trend of newcomers succeeding in our labour markets continues.

When I attended this event last year I spoke about our department’s work to launch, as I just mentioned, the Employers’ Roadmap. This manual explains how you can recruit, assess and select internationally trained workers. It also includes suggestions on how to help these newcomers integrate and stay in the workplace.

Opening your doors to newcomers is not only immensely important to the success of Canada’s immigration program.   It will also determine the success of our country’s future. So as the Top 100 Employers I want to thank you all for the exceptional workplaces you provide to Canadian employees. In particular, I want to thank the employers being nominated in the best employer for new Canadians category.

You have realized that immigrants who have degrees from foreign countries or who have experience working for international companies can contribute something very valuable to your organization. Once again, I want to thank and encourage all of you to continue in this direction, and congratulate you in your efforts. I want to thank you and congratulate you for the work that you’re doing and look forward to partnering with you in the future. Thank you very much.