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

At a news conference to announce preliminary results of the language voucher pilot project
Mississauga, Ontario, November 28, 2010

As delivered

Thank you Dorothy. By the way, people keep asking me how do you say Smiling Buddha in Mandarin? Cheeow Fa. Okay. Thank you very much. I think that’s really more a comment on my figure than my wisdom but it’s true. This is what I’ve been known as.

Thank you so much Dorothy for your kind introduction and more importantly for the great work that you do in helping newcomers, particularly in the Chinese community, succeed here in Canada. You are an example of the kind of dedicated educators, volunteers and professionals, who make the early years in Canada successful years for newcomers to this land of prosperity.

Let me also thank the Punjabi Community Health Services for hosting us here today. We have many of their staff and volunteers. Please give them applause. Thank you for your hospitality.

I look forward to meeting one of their groups downstairs later on. This is a good organization that does important work to promote good health and health literacy for newcomers from everywhere, but particularly from the Punjabi community. Thank you as well to officials from Citizenship and Immigration Canada who helped to organize this afternoon’s announcement.

I actually have two announcements to make, both of which constitute very good news for immigrants to Canada. First of all let me address the issue that Dorothy has mentioned, which is the results of our language voucher pilot project. Now, I think you know that all of the research indicates that the single largest barrier to successful employment for newcomers to Canada is language proficiency.

If we want to ensure that new Canadians find good jobs and economic opportunities, we need to do what we can to help them in many cases improved their English or in some areas French language ability.

Now one of the things that really concerned me when I became Minister of Immigration was seeing that over the past 25 or 30 years we had seen declining economic outcomes for immigrants to Canada, higher rates of unemployment, lower rates of employment and lower incomes.

My number one focus became to do everything we possibly could to turn that around, ensure higher rates of employment, higher rates of income and greater economic opportunity for people who after all, this is why they come to Canada. It’s to pursue economic opportunity.

That’s why we decided to do everything we could to provide more and better language training services to new Canadians. That’s why our government in 2006 upon taking office tripled the federal investment in settlement services including language training. Overall the federal government used to spend, before we came into office, under $200 million annually on settlement and language services for new Canadians. Now we spend well over $600 million a year.

This is an enormous increase reflecting the priority that Prime Minister Harper has placed on successful integration for newcomers. Now, as I say, we know that language constitutes the most serious barrier newcomers face for furthering their education or training and among the most serious barriers to finding employment. We know that language limitations also have an impact on how newcomers integrate into their new communities.

The more comfortable the people are in English or in French, the more likely it is that they’ll be more likely to volunteer with their kids at school, or join a community group. However, at the moment only a small number of immigrants who come to Canada are required to meet a minimum language requirement. We assess the language skills of those who want to come to Canada as skilled workers, obviously, through the points system.

Those skills are graded on a system that assesses their language skills amongst other criteria. Even if the principal applicant in our skilled worker program has a proficiency in English or French, it doesn’t mean that their dependents, their spouse or children, does and indeed family members that they sponsor as parents, grandparents, dependent children or spouses later on together with refugees don’t have to meet a language assessment in coming to Canada.

Roughly only 10% of newcomers to Canada have a language requirement. This means that there are hundreds of thousands of people who arrive here who may be in need of assistance in improving their official language abilities. That’s why we have the language instruction for newcomers to Canada (LINC) which is the main settlement service that we provide. That’s what’s received most of the new funding as a result of our government’s tripling of settlement services.

LINC provides basic language training in English or French to eligible school leaving age permanent residents. It’s a key element of Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s integration programming, accounting for the largest part of settlement funding. LINC is free. It’s free for eligible newcomers. It offers classes at a number of levels of proficiency from basic English on up.

It offers classes full and part time, morning, afternoon and evening and on weekends. It offers courses in classrooms, on-line, via mail and through one on one tutoring. It offers funding to overcome transportation and disability issues. It offers free child minding so that newcomer students with young children can attend classes. It has continuous intake so that very few newcomers need to wait long to be placed in a class.

It funds a range of service providers like colleges, school boards and community organizations that offer courses in various locations in most cities. It’s a very accessible program but despite all of that the current uptake for LINC language instruction is only about 25% of eligible clients of newcomers to Canada.

Even though we tripled the funding, we only saw a very small increase in the number of newcomers enrolling in LINC. That’s why we said we have to do better to make newcomers aware of this service and to benefit from it to make their lives in Canada easier and to give them new and better employment opportunities.

That is why two years ago we decided to implement an innovative language voucher program. We began piloting the idea in the fall of last year and that pilot project will last through to the early part of next year for a total of 18 months. Let me tell you a little bit more about how the project works.

We sent the vouchers to 2,000 randomly selected permanent residents in three provinces, - here in Ontario, Nova Scotia and Alberta. The idea was to get more immigrants into the LINC language programs. We wondered whether personally receiving a language training voucher would raise awareness and uptake of language training amongst eligible new Canadians.

We also thought the vouchers would allow newcomers to be more actively involved in the choice of services they receive. In a way it’s asking them to take personal responsibility for improving their language skills but putting that choice right in front of them in a meaningful, tangible, concrete way.

We wanted to see what kind of impact that voucher language pilot project would have on the number of people enrolling in our free language classes. The study that we’re releasing today is preliminary. We’ll have to wait until early next year for final results but there’s very encouraging news.

Within six months of receiving their voucher, 7% of newcomers who were mailed vouchers enrolled in LINC classes, compared to only 3% of the control group of eligible permanent residents who didn’t receive vouchers during the same period. That’s doubling the number of immigrants in LINC classes during that period. That means we’ve seen so far a 100% higher uptake in free language classes amongst those who received our voucher.

On top of that, within the project 60% of the newcomers taking language classes are women compared to 40% in the control group. Language is especially important perhaps for women because it makes it much easier for them to know their rights, to be able to get out of their home and their own community if they need to, and to find employment if they would like to with language proficiency.

The results so far suggest that by giving newcomers a choice and by putting that choice right in front of them through the voucher, we can increase the number of immigrants who are taking language classes and improving their linguistic abilities. I think this is very good news and we will complete the study next year.

If the results indicate this higher rate of participation, more newcomers learning English and/or French as a result of the voucher program, we will certainly look at how we can expand it in a larger and on a national basis.

The second announcement I wanted to make today was actually with respect to a news release we issued a few days ago but it’s tied to the positive news on LINC vouchers. This is the study that we’ve just completed and published indicating a significant improvement in economic outcomes for skilled workers immigrating to Canada.

Back in 2002 Parliament adopted the New Immigration Refugee Protection Act and along with it a new points grid for the selection of federal skilled workers, which of course is the mainstream core in the immigration program to Canada. About 60% of immigrants to Canada come through the skilled worker program, one third of who are the primary economic migrants and the balance are their family members.

It’s a very, very important program to the future of Canada and to our immigration system. Back in 2002 the new points grid did a number of things. One of them was to raise the requirement for proficiency in one of Canada’s two official languages. That was a little controversial at the time. It made some other adjustments but we have done a major study to follow the results of newcomers selected through the new points grid in the skilled worker program.

One thing you’d have to keep in mind is that these people may have applied for immigration in 2002 or 2003 but because of the big backlog and long processing times that developed in the past decade, they weren’t actually landing in Canada until 2006 and 2007. The data we have is actually quite recent but it’s also very encouraging.

The evaluation measured whether the current federal skilled worker program is selecting immigrants who are more likely to succeed economically in Canada. The answer is yes, it is. In 2009 federal skilled workers made up as I said a very substantial portion of newcomers.  According to the evaluation the biggest predictors of an immigrant’s economic success are having a job already arranged in Canada when applying, the ability to speak English or French and having worked in Canada before applying to immigrate.

Having studied in Canada for at least two years and having a relative in Canada were far less of a determinant of success. This evaluation showed that skilled immigrants are doing well in Canada and filling gaps in our workforce. It undermines the old stereotype about the best educated taxi drivers in the world because it shows in fact that increasingly people are finding jobs in the professions for which they are qualified.

The findings reveal that the selection criteria have been successful in improving economic results of skilled immigrants by placing more emphasis on arranged employment, language and education. Income for skilled workers selected under the IRPA, Immigration Act, criteria was as much as 65% higher than for workers selected under the system prior to 2002.

The new criteria have resulted in a 65% increase in average incomes for immigrants selected under the system since 2002. Skilled workers who already had a job offer, and this is quite remarkable – those with prearranged employment when they applied for permanent residence fared best of all, earning on average over $79,000 just three years after arriving in Canada.

The findings also revealed that skilled workers selected under the new criteria were less likely to rely on employment insurance or social assistance. Among other recommendations, the evaluation suggests that we should place higher priority on younger workers, increase the integrity of the arranged employment part of the program and recommend that further emphasis be placed on fluency in English or French which in fact is something that we did for a requirement implement in June to have mandatory third party language testing for economic immigrants.

I want to say this is very good news because it finally shows some hard statistical data which indicates that in fact we are turning the corner, that the situation is getting better for economic immigrants to Canada, that their incomes are going higher, their employment is going up. The dependence on social assistance and employment insurance is going down.

This gives us a lot of helpful information as we move in the future towards further changes in our immigration system. In fact at some point in the near future we will be announcing consultations on changes to the selection criteria for the skilled worker program so that we can implement some of the lessons that we’ve learned from the past eight years.

Bottom line, good news today for newcomers – a tripling of settlement funding, the voucher pilot project, the new selection grid for skilled workers, all of which are resulting in more people getting integrated more successfully and more quickly, finding better jobs and higher incomes. Ultimately that’s the path to raising happy families amongst those who have chosen Canada.

I’m happy to receive any questions that you have.  I know there are a lot of members of the public here but I think we want to receive questions at least initially to members of the media.