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

Thank you very much to Nova Scotia’s Office of Immigration for co-sponsoring today’s Chamber luncheon. I’m honoured to be here in Halifax. Please pass on my greetings to my colleague and counterpart Minister Moore. It’s great to see MLA Leonard Preyra here. I call him Professor because I first met him in his classroom. He actually invited me in when I was an MP for only two months, and he let me come and speak to his poor, unsuspecting students. So congratulations on your public service, and again, your election and appointment as Parliamentary Secretary, Leonard. And Rob, thanks to you and the Halifax Chamber of Commerce for this invitation and opportunity to talk about what is really probably the most important long-term economic issue for Canada and for this region.

You know, it’s true to say that Canada is a land that has always been one of openness to newcomers — you know that better than anyone else in this part of the country, just down the street here from Pier 21 — whether it was the United Empire Loyalists and the Black Loyalists who came here as refugees in the 18th century, the French settlers before them, or the generations upon generations that followed in their footsteps, the Clearance Scots and the Famine Irish, like my people. You know, all of this reminds me of when I was on a radio talk show here in Halifax about two years ago, talking about refugee issues, and someone called up and said, “I don’t even understand why it is that we’re accepting refugees in this country. You know, why don’t we take care of our own first?” And I said, “Well, actually, many of us are the descendants of refugees, whether your family came here as United Empire Loyalists or Clearance Scots or Famine Irish, the Acadians who came back after the deportations, the Black Loyalists, and on and on the story goes, people who were often the underdogs of history, who founded this amazing society of freedom and opportunity.”

And we are maintaining that tradition today. Canada over the past six years has been welcoming the highest sustained number of newcomers in our history – welcoming over a quarter of a million new permanent residents in each of the past six years, adding the equivalent of 0.8 percent to our population every year through immigration, which is the highest sustained level of immigration in the developed world. In fact, as Prime Minister Harper pointed out in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January, Canada was one of the only developed countries to maintain high levels of immigration during the global economic downturn. Now this had never been done before in modern Canadian immigration history. In the early 1980s, immigration was cut by half. It was cut enormously in the early and mid-‘90s, to reflect the fact that the labour market was tighter. And so it was a bit counterintuitive, and politically risky, for us to maintain high levels during the global downturn, when inevitably we would see unemployment going up.

But why did we do it? We did it because we believe that immigration is important for the long term, and we need to think long term. We can’t just respond to short-term developments in our economy. And we know what the long term looks like, of course. It reminds me of John Maynard Keyne’s old line, “Sooner or later we’re all dead.” But sooner or later, for sure, we’re all aging. Our population is getting older, and our workforce is shrinking, just at a time when we see a re-emerging strength in the Canadian economy from coast to coast. So we already have a problem of large and growing labour shortages in various regions and industries.

Now, often when I speak about labour shortages, people assume I’m just talking about the oil-sands developments in northern Alberta. And it’s true, the labour shortages there will soon be at a crisis point. But the labour shortages we can find in virtually every corner of the country. I mean, just yesterday, I was in downtown Toronto, meeting – if you can believe it, right in the heart of downtown Toronto – with companies that can’t find Canadians to do particular specialized IT engineering jobs. I was out in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada’s high-tech capital, where we graduate thousands of brilliant, young students of information technology at those colleges, and yet there are IT employers who can’t find people to do particular skills. Tomorrow, I’ll be in Montreal, meeting with the video game industry. Believe it, we have a very large one, and it produces billions of dollars of wealth, and they’re desperate to bring in folks from abroad because they can’t find enough Canadians to help them program those games, just like the animation industry in Vancouver. These shortages are across the entire spectrum of skills in our economy.

I was recently in southern Saskatchewan, where I grew up, and I met with farmers there who are offering $25 an hour for unskilled farm labour, for people with no education necessarily, just to do basic farm labour. For 25 bucks an hour. I met with a steel manufacturing company in central Alberta offering $26 an hour for people with merely a high school diploma to come and work in the factory. No one is applying, and then they have to move their company to Mexico. Well, back to southern Saskatchewan. The funny thing is, it’s not just unskilled farm labour. They’re looking for everything. They have 15,000 jobs posted today on the provincial government’s website, saskjobs.ca. And I actually heard about a problem I never thought could possibly exist: A shortage of lawyers. I call that a good problem. With apologies to the lawyers here.

So they’re bringing in temporary foreign workers as lawyers from South Africa to do the legal work, because there’s too much work to be done. And now we know, with the tremendous upcoming development here in the Halifax region, with the Irving Shipyards and the rebuilding of our naval fleet, there will be acute skills shortages here. I mean, Halifax Greater Region, I think, is starting to approach getting close to almost full employment. When you’re talking around five per cent unemployment, you’re not too far from technical full employment.

And so this is only going to accelerate. And here’s the paradox: While we’ve been maintaining those high levels of immigration, every year we admit tens of thousands of those newcomers who end up finding themselves unemployed or chronically under-employed, stuck in survival jobs, in an economy with huge labour shortages. How does this make any sense?

You know, for too long we’ve allowed our immigration programs to become rigid and slow moving, the consequence of which has been diminishing economic results for newcomers to Canada. All the data demonstrate this. All of the studies confirm that for about three decades we have seen on-average economic results for newcomers decline, and higher levels of unemployment. In fact, immigrants to Canada have a rate of unemployment twice as high as that of the general population. These are immigrants with university degrees three times higher than amongst people born in Canada with degrees. Immigrants earn, on average, 70 per cent of the incomes of people born in Canada. You all know the archetype of this problem. As they say, the safest place to have a heart attack in Toronto is in a taxicab. The chances are that your driver is a cardiac surgeon. And you know, it’s a myth, but that myth is too often true.

Of course, immigration has made an enormous contribution to our country in many intangible ways. And of course, people continue to succeed beyond belief in our economy — people like Nadir Mohammed, who arrived as a refugee from Idi Amin’s Uganda in the early 1970s, with tens of thousands of other of his Ismaili co-religionists. He arrived, and imagine, 40 years later this guy who came with nothing as a refugee is now the CEO of our largest telecom company. Mike Lazaridis, who founded RIM, was born in Turkey. Hassan Khosrowshahi, who was the founder of Future Shop and sold it for over a billion dollars, came to Canada as an immigrant from Iran. So it is true that in this country, if you come and work hard and play by the rules, anything is possible. But it’s also true that those examples are the exception and not the rule.

I feel a certain moral burden in this job when I meet people who have come to this country filled with hope and dreams about realizing their potential, only to find disappointment, to find themselves stuck in survival jobs, unable to realize their potential. Like the woman I met in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, who was a radiologist, who emigrated here from Iran three years ago. She said to me her husband is a paediatric surgeon. She broke down in tears in front of me to explain how, after three years, her family’s savings are gone, they’re no further ahead in getting their licenses to practice, and they can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. And she said, as much as she hates Iran because of the crazy government these days, she’s going to have to go back in order to make an income so she can put her son through college at UBC, so that he can realize his dream to be the Canadian doctor that discovers the cure to cancer.

I meet women and men like that every day. We owe it to them, and we owe it to ourselves – we owe it to Canada – to get this right, to stop the dysfunctionality in a rigid and slow-moving immigration system. Yes, that does lead to many success stories. Yes, that does enrich our diversity. But it too often ends up with stories of disappointment and frustration for newcomers in an economy that needs to fully benefit from their talents and hard work. And that’s what we’re seeking to do.

So we must move from a slow and rigid immigration system to one that is fast and flexible, one that aligns newcomers with the jobs that are available now and in the future. One of the problems we developed was that, for years, we were selling twice as many seats on the plane to Canada as there were seats available. We would take in 400,000 or 500,000 applications, but we were admitting in the past 220,000 people every year. People in the departure lounge for Canada who had bought their tickets couldn’t get onboard. And that’s how we ended up with a backlog of a million people waiting seven or eight years.

This means that we lose many of the world’s best and brightest, like the top graduate of Hyderabad’s Indian Institute of Technology, who I met in Mumbai a couple of years ago. This guy, I mean, he’s from a country of a billion people, the top student at the top university. And I said to him, “Boy, we’d love to have you in Canada.” And he said, “So Minister, how would that work?” And I started to shuffle and stare at the floor and mumbled, and I said, “Well, you could apply and we’ll get back in touch with you in about eight years.” He said, “But my friend who graduated with me, he’s got into Australia only six months later. He’s already in Australia.”

Folks, we’ve been losing the competition for many of those who are the best and brightest. And so we need a real-time immigration system. To get there, we must deal decisively with these old backlogs, which is why we announced in the budget that we are returning about three-quarters of the applications in our main immigration backlog. Difficult decision. Regret that we had to make it. But in order for us to fix these fundamental structural problems, you’ve got to take difficult decisions. This means that, within about 18 months, we will finally have in our core immigration program a real-time system, where new applicants – if they’re qualified – will be admitted within months rather than years. And that, in turn, means that employers can look at the increasingly mobile global labour market to proactively recruit people to Canada, and we can facilitate their admission quickly so they can come to work at their skill level in Canada.

All of these changes we’re making, by the way, we’ve done on the basis of research and data, looking at international precedent. For example, Australia and New Zealand have created a system that we’d like to emulate, where they’ve developed a pool of qualified applicants who – and this is what we’re going to do – who will have to do a pre-assessment of their education and its equivalence to the Canadian standard. You know, part of the craziness of our current system is that we allocate the same weight to a degree from Harvard as from the worst college in the United States. We look at the quantity of education on paper rather than its quality or relevance to the Canadian labour market. We’re going to begin, through designating certain agencies that have expertise in assessing foreign education, to make a qualitative assessment. So we’ll admit people whose degrees and diplomas are actually going to be recognized as such in Canada. And then we’ll begin a process of pre-assessment of foreign credentials for those who want to work in our licensed professions. That will come out of the work we’re doing with Nova Scotia and the other provinces to streamline and speed up the process of credential recognition, creating a common national approach as much as possible for the credentialing and assessment of credentials.

So those applicants will go into this pool. They’ll also be selected based on a new points grid that puts more emphasis on younger immigrants, more emphasis on Canadian – as opposed to foreign – work experience. That will also really prioritize people who have pre-arranged jobs. They’ll go into that pool, having given us consent to share their applications with employers. So if one of Irving’s subcontractors three years from now finds that they have a particular need for a certain kind of engineer, and that Canadians just aren’t available, they’ll be able to do a query in the new system, pull out the people with those specifications, do their due diligence, offer them jobs, and then we will bring them in, we hope, in about two months’ time. That’s what I mean by a real-time immigration system that connects immigrants with the jobs that are available, empowering employers to select people. Because employers know better than governments who can actually come to work at their skill level shortly after arrival.

Now, we’ll be making a number of other important reforms. One of which we’ve already done, of course, is the Provincial Nominee Program. The expansion of that in Nova Scotia had, I think, a very positive effect back in 2005-2006. I know that Nova Scotia and other provinces would like to see an increase in their allotment for provincial nominees. We’re working with the provinces, having done a major evaluation of that program, to ensure that we’re maximizing the value of the people and of the positions that are being used for nomination.

And we just announced, working with the provinces, the implementation of a minimum language benchmark. Some provinces, unfortunately, have been nominating people with no official language proficiency. And when that happens, you know what? Those people, in the long run, probably are set for failure in our economy, especially if their employer goes out of business or lays them off. Good luck keeping your head above water in this modern marketplace with no English-language skills. So this is to protect them and ensure their future. But we will work with the provinces. There’ll be a meeting with Marilyn and my other provincial colleagues to look at the way forward on the Provincial Nominee Program. But the point of our federal reforms is to complement the strengths of the Provincial Nominee Program.

We’ll also be redesigning our investment and entrepreneurial programs to get much bigger bang for the buck for Canada. We’ve been selling our country way short on attracting investors and entrepreneurs. Yesterday, I announced, for example, that we’ll be creating a new start-up visa program that will facilitate the quick immigration of innovators from abroad, who are being supported by Canadian angel investors and venture capitalists so they can come in quickly and create their businesses here – businesses that we think will be of global effect, global reach. And I was just speaking here about some of the brilliant work being done in Nova Scotia in the financial services industry, and the need for and the desire to attract entrepreneurs like that. This program will facilitate that perfectly.

Finally, as we mentioned in the budget, we’ll be taking steps to improve the alignment between the temporary worker program that fills short-term labour gaps and our unemployment insurance system. Because one of the paradoxes is that even in certain regions and certain communities with chronic double-digit unemployment, employers are coming to us because they can’t find local folks to take jobs that are available – not just seasonal jobs, some of these are year-round jobs. And for me, it is a great paradox that we would bring people literally from around the globe to come and work in communities where we know there’s double-digit unemployment.

And so, as the budget announced, we’ll be trying to ensure employers know that, within the catchment area, there are a certain number of people who are registered as unemployed and that they should be recruiting those people. And we’ll be letting the unemployed people know that the employer is hiring. We should not be bringing temporary foreign workers from around the globe to take jobs in Canada in communities with chronic high unemployment. I think we need to improve that. And that’s all part of our broader vision.

So let me just close by saying I know that here in Nova Scotia and across Atlantic Canada, there is a growing awareness that the skills shortages and the aging of the population is going to have a particularly acute impact in this region in the future. We all have to work together – the business community, the federal and provincial governments, non-profit agencies that work with newcomers – to ensure that immigration, more than ever before, works for Canada’s economy so that Canada’s economy works for newcomers.

That’s our vision. And I hope and believe that, when these reforms are completed, we will look back and see that no longer is there an unemployment gap between newcomers and native-born Canadians, that we have a new generation of successful immigrant entrepreneurs arriving in Canada – arriving in Atlantic Canada – and creating wealth, realizing their potential, and contributing fully to this magnificent society. So I look forward to working with all of you in the months and years to come on these important reforms. And thanks again for your attention.