CIMM Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE LA CITOYENNETÉ ET DE L'IMMIGRATION

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, May 4, 2000

• 0916

[English]

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon E. Benoit (Lakeland, Canadian Alliance)): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Today we're here with officials from Citizenship and Immigration Canada to start our study of immigration numbers, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2). We're about to proceed with our study relating to immigration behind the numbers, benefits to Canada, social and economic effects, etc.

We have as witnesses today Joan Atkinson, Dougall Aucoin, Kathleen O'Connor, and Jean Roberge. Welcome to all of you. I'm looking forward to your presentation. It will be a very informal session today. It is an extremely important topic; there's no doubt about it. There's been a lot of talk recently—I've certainly heard a lot of talk—about immigration numbers. I'm sure your presentation will be a good way to start off. So we'll just go ahead.

Ms. Joan Atkinson (Acting Deputy Minister, Policy and Program Development, Citizenship and Immigration Canada): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairperson.

We thought today we would take you through a presentation on what goes into the thinking behind the immigration levels, what we look at in our planning for immigration levels every year. The objectives of our presentation today are to talk about some of our planning considerations; to touch on the demographics, the economic impacts, the social impacts, and the operational considerations that go into the levels exercise every year; to talk a little bit about immigration trends and what the numbers are telling us; to talk about where we're going in our immigration planning process and our desire to move to a multi-year planning framework; to give you a little bit of information on what we achieved in 1999; and then to talk about the year 2000 plan and where we're going.

In terms of our planning considerations, I think it's no surprise to say we live in a continually changing international environment. When we look at things, we start with the macro. We start taking a look at the international scene and the global events that impact on the movements of people.

We know that in recent decades population growth and advances in communication and transportation technologies have certainly increased both the stock and the flow of international migrants. The UN Commission on Population and Development estimated in 1990 that globally there were some 120 million people living outside their country of birth. This is a tremendous number of people who are on the move around the world.

A variety of push and pull factors contribute to that international movement of both voluntary and involuntary migrants. With globalization, the impact of events and phenomena far away are felt at home, as we all know.

In the post-Cold War era, there is considerable instability and conflict around the world. Since 1989 ethnic and religious tensions have been found in close to 100 intrastate conflicts. One-quarter of African countries experience war or civil conflict while they are struggling to cope with a third of the world's refugees and displaced people. There have been recent conflicts, as we know, in the former Yugoslavia, in the Middle East, as well as in southern and central Asia.

The transitions to democracy and market capitalism have been felt in both eastern Europe and Latin America. The fall of the Berlin Wall has opened up the post-Soviet countries to the world. The rise of middle-income countries, the so-called Asian tigers, has caused an increase in the highly educated, mobile global workforce. The later economic downturns, such as the recent Asian flu, have put a crimp in some of the movements from that part of the world.

• 0920

A lot of these events are beyond our control and can impact on our immigration levels. We need to be able to balance our demographic, social, and economic needs against our ability to absorb. I want to just touch on some of those impacts.

First of all let me talk a little bit about demographics. As you know, our minister has been talking a lot recently about the demographic impacts of immigration to Canada. It's not clear, based on the research, what Canada's optimal population may be, either today or in the future. Recent OECD studies the minister has made reference to have shown that all the major industrialized countries, including Canada, are experiencing rising numbers of elderly people in their populations, in conjunction with falling numbers of people entering the labour force. This is the so-called dependency ratio, the ratio between those over 65 and those aged between 15 and 64.

Both Canadian and international studies, however, confirm that for Canada, immigration has only a relatively minor impact on the age structure of the population. It's true and clear, the research shows, that immigration can impact on labour force growth and can also impact on total population growth. So we know immigration can and does prevent population and labour force decline, and that's important to support an aging population. But the research would indicate the impact is much less obvious on the age structure of the population. So demographic arguments alone cannot be used to justify annual immigration levels with respect to affecting either the optimal size or the age structure of the population.

The OECD study did conclude that immigration is certainly an important tool governments can use to try to offset the aging population, but we know immigration is not the only tool. It is but one tool governments can use in dealing with the aging population.

In terms of economic impacts of immigration, a number of studies during the 1980s found that a steady stream of immigration, whether low or high, would not in and of itself cause unemployment, but any sudden increase in immigration might strain market adjustment mechanisms, thereby creating a temporary rise in unemployment. In the 1990s researchers found it more difficult to isolate and analyse the impacts of immigration on the employment opportunities of Canadians or on specific segments of the labour market. They tended instead to focus on the economic performance of immigrants themselves.

While we know immigration contributes to growth in the labour force, it's more difficult for us to quantify precisely the effect on overall rates of economic growth. We do know, in terms of the economic impacts, that we do see a gradual net economic benefit to Canada over the long term. Obviously immigration brings a larger market of consumers, a stable supply of skilled workers, and inflows of both financial and human capital. It provides a steady source of new demand for housing and for durable goods. Business immigrants can create niche markets, and ties to countries of origin may offer Canada a comparative advantage in the global economy.

But it has also been determined that immigrants who landed in Canada during the 1990s are having more difficulty integrating into the labour market than earlier arrivals, even though more recent arrivals have higher levels of education and language. We don't yet know all the reasons that more recent arrivals are having difficulty, and we are continuing to explore that in our research.

One likely possibility may be the recession that was experienced by most western countries in the early 1990s. Studies show not only newly arriving immigrants were having difficulty accessing the labour market during that period of time, but new entrants in the Canadian labour market, Canadian-born or Canadian-resident, were also experiencing difficulties. We know newly arrived immigrants do face barriers to recognizing their foreign credentials, and that may be a factor.

One of the reasons we are fine-tuning our selection system and working on the issue of access to trades and professions is that we recognize those are very important issues for us. But we do need to do more work to fully understand the forces at play and how they impact.

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In terms of social impacts of immigration levels, tangible benefits such as social participation can be assessed. In a national survey of giving, volunteering, and participating, we find immigrants are contributing in very tangible ways. They are within 10% of the national average when it comes to volunteering, for example.

The non-tangible benefits are a little more difficult to assess empirically, but it can't be ignored that immigration fosters a very rich mosaic of many different languages, religions, and cultural traditions that enrich the lives of all Canadians. And in fact Canadians recognize that. In a recent opinion survey done by Ekos, we found that not only are people in support of opening the front door if the back door is closed, but they also generally view immigration as having positive effects and impacts. They recognize that immigration strengthens our economy and our national identity, that it is rewarding for Canada, and that to a certain extent it helps us to reduce intolerance in our society.

Concerns about immigrants' impact on the economy and on employment or unemployment rates have certainly receded. Canadians are much more receptive to the notion that immigrants bring skills to Canada that strengthen our economy and help to keep it competitive. In fact some provinces, territories, and municipalities want and need a significant influx of newcomers to fill skill shortages in particular industries, to ensure continued economic expansion, or to prevent rural depopulation.

Others do face challenges in delivering services, due to relatively high volumes and concentrations of immigrants and refugees. As you can all appreciate, one of our challenges is to find innovative ways to encourage our immigrants to settle in non-traditional destinations, given the very high concentration of immigrants in our large urban centres, Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal in particular. But we have to keep in mind of course that mobility rights are enshrined in the Canadian Charter, which permit newcomers to move wherever they wish to live in Canada once they arrive.

Those are some of the global and big-picture issues we look at. Very importantly, however, we need to look at operational considerations at a very pragmatic level when we are looking at our annual immigration plan. In considering the plan, we need to look at our capacity to deliver the immigration program. As you know, we have many competing different priorities for the resources available to us to deliver the program.

In addition to a very dynamic immigration program, we have a non-immigrant program, where we deliver visas to students, to temporary workers, and to visitors. The non-immigrant program is a very important program for Canada. It brings a lot of economic and cultural benefits to Canada. We have seen tremendous growth in recent years in our non-immigrant program in students, visitors, and temporary workers.

Within the immigration program, we need to balance family-class migration, refugee migration, and the economic component. We give priority processing to sponsored spouses and dependent children. We give priority processing to government-sponsored and privately sponsored refugees. We have competing priorities within the program for the resources available to us.

We also look at the trends in applications received, things such as the person-to-case ratio, the number of visas, and the number of landings that will be generated by one application, for example. We also look at the shift in source country. We have seen the shift from countries where documentation is readily available, where it's easy for our clients to obtain for us documentation that is very credible and very reliable, to source countries where it's much more challenging for our clients to get us documentation and more challenging for us to ensure we have the documentation we need to make our decisions.

The next slide shows you that shift in source countries. I'm not sure if you can see it clearly on the slide, but China has moved to our primary source of regular migration. It is also, as I know you can appreciate and recognize, our primary source of irregular migration. That poses unique challenges for us. China offers us substantial opportunities in terms of its pool of highly skilled workers, business immigrants, visitors, students, and temporary workers, but it also poses enormous challenges to us in terms of the irregular migration coming from that part of the world.

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Most dramatically, you can see, for example, Hong Kong, which was our number one source area for many years, dropped off the list of the top ten countries between 1996 and 1999. Pakistan moved from number six in 1996 to number three in 1999. So there has been a substantial shift in our source countries. We know China, India, and Pakistan are at the centre of the global pool of highly skilled workers in terms of education, language, and technical skills, but we also have enormous challenges on the irregular migration side from those countries.

The next slide takes a look at immigration trends over a longer period of time, almost a twenty-year period, nineteen years, from 1980 to 1999. In general, over the last twenty years we have been successful in meeting at least the medium range of the targets we have set for ourselves. This slide shows it's important for us to take the longer-term view of the numbers of immigrants coming into Canada, rather than looking at it in a snapshot way on an annual basis. That is one of the primary reasons we want to move to a multi-year planning process.

The recent tabling of the new bill is an opportune time for us to launch a multi-year planning process for immigration levels. A multi-year planning process provides us with an opportunity to better coordinate our policy framework; our international challenges, some of which I've described; and our operational realities—to pull all of these pieces together in a more cohesive fashion and a more integrated way.

We also want to look at increasing the emphasis on outcomes the program is seeking to achieve over the longer term in response to this ever-changing environment. While the approximate number of immigrants expected to land in Canada every year is important and our targets are important for operational planning, settlement, and integration purposes, remaining focused on the program's outcomes and how effectively they respond both to the changing environment and to the government's objectives is probably a more useful way of looking at the immigration plan. Put into context, the exact number of immigrants arriving in Canada, in our view, should be more appropriately considered over the longer term rather than on a year-by-year basis.

The multi-year planning process will allow us to integrate such factors as policy development; global and domestic trends; our operational environment; our resource allocation; the research we are conducting, both within the department and through our academic community, such as the Metropolis project; client service initiatives; processing changes; and our information technology infrastructure.

On policy development, just as an example, our new selection system, which we are hoping to be able to introduce in conjunction with our legislative reform, will have an impact on our planning and on the numbers that will be coming through.

We are very much, at this point, in a transitional year. In developing the new act, we entered into many fruitful working relationships with stakeholder communities, ethnic communities, provinces, and territories. We want to build on the relationships and the consultation we engaged in in developing the new legislation, in terms of moving forward on a multi-year planning process for immigration levels.

I'd like to turn just briefly to our achievements in 1999 on immigration levels. The target minimum level was set at 200,000 to 225,000. We in fact did better in 1999 than we had expected. We had originally projected, about halfway through the year, that given all of the different factors at play, we would probably do no better than 180,000, which would be below target. We in fact achieved 95% of the target in 1999; total landings were 189,764.

The factors that impacted on our ability to meet the lower end, the 200,000, included the shift in source countries, as we talked about; the drop in person-to-case ratio for the same amount of work; a fewer number of visas and therefore fewer landings; and the competing priorities we talked about, such as the non-immigrant activities and of course our response to Kosovo, which drew resources away from our bread-and-butter activity of delivering levels to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo.

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The next slide shows you our 1999 results and also gives you a comparison with 1997 and 1998. There is some good news in our results for 1999. Not only did we do better than in 1998 and come closer to achieving our targets, but we did better than expected in the family-class component. We achieved 103% of the lower end of the target for family class. The numbers of economic immigrants were greater, and we achieved our government-assisted refugee target for that particular component.

The 2000 plan sets the estimated range for immigrants and refugees again at 200,000 to 225,000. We are confident we can meet this target. As the number of landings and applications being received continues to go up, the impact of measures we have taken, such as temporary duty and resource allocation in strategic ways, are starting to pay off. We've seen that in our ability to achieve 95% of our target for 1999, and we are very hopeful that for 2000 we're going to do even better.

However, we have to recognize there are still factors that are going to impact on our ability in 2000 to meet the levels for 2000 and in future years. We have to be mindful of the transitional impact of new legislation. We are engaged in a client service initiative and looking at various redesign options and improved delivery proposals. And we know with the moneys we have received through the 2000 budget, we're going to be making strategic investments, primarily on the program integrity side, but also some money is being allocated to help us clear backlogs. So we're hopeful that with all of those factors, we'll continue to be able to make good progress and meet our levels for the year 2000.

That's the end of my overview presentation.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Thank you very much, Ms. Atkinson, for your presentation. You touched on the issues well, and I do appreciate that. A lot of factors that are to be considered have been brought into your presentation. It's a good place to start.

I'll open the questions now with Mr. Price. Oh, I don't know if we have a list here. Do we have a list? Sorry, David. Do you have any questions right now, David? I don't want to put you on the spot.

Some voices: Oh, oh!

Mr. David Price (Compton—Stanstead, PC): Yes, for sure.

Thank you very much for this. I was the one who asked for this study, and this is the beginning of it.

The problem I had in the beginning was, where do the numbers come from? There's a number that comes out of your department, and from what I see, yes, there's some planning in here, but it's still not very clear where the numbers actually come from. We seem to be just following the trend of year after year and saying, “Okay, if this worked this year, next year we have space to add extra numbers.”

What bothers me is we see, not necessarily experts, but other people out there saying, “Well, no, 95,000 should be the top number we should be bringing in; it's all we really need”, and other people saying, “No, it should be 500,000”. That's what I'd like to get to the bottom of: what do we really need?

It brings in everything that's happening. Particularly you mentioned the global economy and how it's changing things. If I look at my own area, I'll have a need in the next year of almost 2,000 employees in woodworking, and because of the way our system works, it's hard to get them in. People don't want to move there. It's a little bit far from the large city. So there's a need, and I don't see how we're addressing this. We're looking at numbers overall. You did ask of course if those numbers are going to the right places. It's the whole picture around this.

I guess what I'm asking you is, where do your figures really come from? Are you looking at the needs in the sense of where we're going, not just where we've been?

• 0940

Ms. Joan Atkinson: That's a very good question, and it has a complicated answer, but let me try.

Obviously we look at historical trends. As we indicated in one of our slides, our view is that in fact we need to take the longer-term view increasingly in terms of the numbers that have come in and the impact of those numbers on all of the different factors we've talked about. It's very clear the government is committed to having an open and dynamic immigration program, and that speaks to having numbers that are indicative of having an open and dynamic program.

We do look at our absorptive capacity in the country. When we talk about numbers of 500,000 or 150,000 or 200,000, whatever they may be, we always have to be mindful of absorptive capacity. And that's tricky, because absorptive capacity is dependent on many things. It's dependent on the mix—that is, the mix between the different components of the program.

We would expect that those who come in through the economic component, which is the largest component of the program, are going to be self-sufficient. They are going to be contributors to the Canadian economy virtually on arrival. That's why we are selecting them: because we believe they are going to contribute to the economy.

The family-class component is important, because one of the cornerstones of our immigration program is family reunification, and family reunification helps to build strong communities. So it's going to continue to be an important element of our program. Through the sponsorship element of that, you would hope family-class immigrants will be supported by their sponsors. But we know family-class members are not selected for their skills, for example. They will have other needs, if you will, that the economic immigrants will not have.

And then there's the refugee component. The refugee component consists of the refugees we resettle from overseas, where we make a direct commitment to settle those individuals and we put money aside specifically to deal with the needs of refugees being resettled from overseas; and there are the refugees who arrive at our borders and claim refugee status, and we are very reactive to those.

The absorptive capacity is dependent to a certain extent, not just on the overall numbers, but on what kinds of immigrants you're bringing in and what the mix is between those different components. So that's one of the things we obviously have to take into account.

Mr. David Price: Have you looked at the immigrants and refugees who have come in over the last x number of years as to how they've actually absorbed into society and which ones are still...well, you might say living on welfare?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Yes. As I said, researchers have increasingly, in the last decade or so, started to take a look at the economic performance of individual immigrants. We have done a lot of our own research in the department using our IMDB, immigration database, which I think you probably have heard of before. It links tax-filer data and immigration data and allows us to look at immigrants and their relative economic performance by looking at their income, their usage of employment insurance, and—

Mr. David Price: That's very interesting. I didn't know about that. That's an excellent tool.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: We can also look at their usage of social assistance, because of course you can determine all of those things through the tax-filer database. We've been able to link categories of immigrants, and even within categories of immigrants, in the economic component, for example, we've been able to track level of education and relative economic performance and compare that economic performance to Canadian-born, for example. So we can track immigrant “performance”—and I use that word in a very general sense—and Canadian-born.

That's been very useful to us, particularly in our policy work on redesigning the selection system, because it allows us to identify what factors correlate most closely to higher economic performance, for example. But we have to be careful here, because while that looks at economic performance, we know immigrants bring other benefits to Canada that, as I talked about, are much more difficult to measure empirically: the social benefits, the cultural benefits. Immigrants, regardless of what category they're in when they come into Canada, have an impact on and bring benefits to Canada.

• 0945

But certainly in terms of the economic performance and usage of social assistance, employment insurance, and so on, we are able to do a lot more research. And the research has indicated, as I said, that in general, immigrants across the board are having a more difficult time reaching the Canadian average in income. We're not exactly sure why that is, and as I've said, we're continuing to do more research, and others are looking at that as well. But certainly we have that ability.

Mr. David Price: Let me give you an example of why.

May I continue, Mr. Chair?

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): We have Mr. Telegdi on board here, but you'll have no problem having another shot at it, David.

Mr. David Price: Because you're not sitting there? Is that why?

Voices: Oh, oh!

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Actually I have to leave very soon.

Mr. Telegdi.

Mr. Andrew Telegdi (Kitchener—Waterloo, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Let me continue along the same lines. Very recently a study was put out on immigrants maybe not reaching the economic levels they have in the past. The reason given was....

We talk a lot about the brain drain in this country. A big problem we have is brain waste. And of course as a federal government, we have problems, because we're not the ones who recognize credentials. I can give you the example of my father. When he came to this country, he couldn't get a job out in B.C. as an architect or a town planner. We ended up migrating to Toronto, where he could get a job as a planner, because they recognized his degree. His degree was from the University of Paris; it was an excellent degree.

Another dramatic way I can demonstrate it is, in my region of Waterloo, we have a shortage of physicians, approximately fifty. We have more than fifty internationally trained physicians in that region, and even though they passed the exams to make sure they are qualified, what is keeping them from being able to practise is not having their internship. So here we have a real tragedy for the individuals involved. It's a personal tragedy to every one of them. We also of course have the social negative that we don't have the physicians in the Waterloo region and we are under-serviced.

So as much as I hear talk about the brain drain, we have a tremendous problem with brain waste. I'm not sure how we can get the provinces onside on this, but it's critical. We are going out to compete for, in some cases, the best and the brightest, and unless we are willing to recognize those credentials, people are not going to come. Nobody wants to come where their degrees aren't respected. The challenge for us will be to work with the provinces to make that happen, because this is a real economic disincentive for Canada. We're losing out. When we have somebody who can't practise what they're trained for, we're really going to lose out. Are we having any success in that direction?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: I'm happy to report we are making progress. We, together with Human Resources Development Canada, are very active on the issue of access to trades and professions.

We co-chair—in fact Mr. Aucoin co-chairs—with the Province of Ontario, a federal-provincial-territorial working group on access to trades and professions, which is attempting to deal with this very issue of credential recognition of immigrants. The working group organized a very successful national symposium in October of last year, where for the first time we brought together in one place the provinces and territories; the regulatory bodies that regulate access to trades and professions; the stakeholder groups; and the non-governmental organizations, including some from your region, Mr. Telegdi, that represent and work with newcomers and see this daily in the settlement and integration work they do with newcomers. We brought in professional associations and we had international experts; we had people from Australia, India, and the U.K.

• 0950

We had a very good conference where there was a lot of airing of the issues. A lot of ideas were put on the table about how we can move this forward.

We do have the provinces engaged in this debate and in the initiative. As you pointed out, it's very difficult and complex. As the federal government, we don't have responsibility for recognition and regulation of trades and professions. That is a provincial responsibility. We think the provinces are increasingly concerned on their own part and are recognizing the brain waste, as you've described it. We're very hopeful that a number of the follow-up activities will yield some results.

Maybe, Dougall, I could ask you to speak a little bit more about that.

Mr. Dougall Aucoin (Acting Director General, Selection, Citizenship and Immigration Canada): Thank you.

One of the issues that struck us early on in the work of the federal-provincial working group was the lack of infrastructure in Canada, for example to even assess credentials. A lot of the work we've been doing in the province is to develop this infrastructure to allow credential assessment bodies to evolve in the different provinces, so that individuals have an opportunity to bring their education and their working life experience to these assessment centres and get them evaluated in the context of a Canadian labour market and Canadian equivalency, if you want.

The other part of the work that is very important is to get these credentials recognized by the provincial bodies and by the professional associations and to allow for the portability of these assessments as individuals move across the country. That's why it's been so important for us to work with HRDC—Human Resources Development Canada—which is, in the context of the Social Union Framework Agreement, working on the Agreement on Internal Trade and breaking down the barriers that currently exist even in moving across the provinces.

So by championing both causes together, we've been able to foster a better cooperation with the provinces, putting both sets of agendas on the table at the same time and ensuring that all the people there are concerned with these issues and understand, as you suggest, the waste of the resources we bring into the country because we're unable to recognize and make productive use of their skills.

That's also been part of the development of our new selection system, to try to make sure that as we move towards a new selection system that selects individuals because of their human capital and their attributes, in the end they'll be able to make productive use of those skills when they arrive in Canada.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Mr. Price.

Mr. David Price: I'll continue right on after Andrew.

Just on what you were talking about, I come out of the construction industry in Quebec; I was an electrical contractor. You can well imagine what we go through there interprovincially. And it isn't just the provinces. It goes a lot further than that. We're talking about professional associations. It is a professional association in Quebec where it is not in Ontario and so on. So you have a profession to deal with.

You also have unions to deal with. The closed-shop attitude of unions is one of the big problems we see. That really hits the immigrants and refugees coming in looking for jobs.

I just want to give you an actual example of, as Andrew said, brain waste. About a month and a half ago I was with Jean over in London, and I had the opportunity to sit in on an interview with a young couple who wanted to come to Canada. The gentleman had six years of university and was an aeronautical engineer, but he had already checked it out, and his certificate was not recognized in Canada. Therefore he was applying as an aircraft mechanic, a trade he had worked at while he was going to university and so on, and he had a really good background in that. But in our selection system, aircraft mechanics were not high on the list.

• 0955

So we ended up refusing what even the immigration officer with me said was a good, solid family that would have been able to add to Canada. Because of our system, they were blocked there. Our system really blocked them in two ways. First of all they wouldn't recognize the aircraft mechanic part, as there was no need, and on the other side, we could have had an aeronautical engineer, and we need aeronautical engineers—they were high on the list—yet we couldn't accept the couple, because the certificate would not be recognized in Canada.

You're talking about the new selection system. How are we doing on that?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Let me start on that one. What you've pointed to is exactly a problem we want to try to avoid with our new selection system. Our current selection system, as you point out, is very much tied to occupation. You have to find yourself somewhere on that general occupation list in order to be accepted. We want to move away from an occupation-based system. All of the research we've done through this database I talked about indicates to us that education and language are the most important criteria. Work experience is important as well, but education and communication skills essentially are the best indicators of success in terms of relative economic performance.

We're moving to what we call a human capital model, where we look at a basket of skills, a basket of attributes, which will include education, language skills, work experience, and adaptability features, as opposed to occupational titles and occupational niches. We're doing this so that people who come to Canada have the right mix of skills, the right basket of skills, and enough flexibility to allow them to move into whatever occupation, because we know those attributes—the education, communication skills, and work experience—are the most critical ones for successful establishment.

A new selection model will not kick somebody out because “aircraft mechanic” is not on the list and their credentials as an aeronautical engineer are not recognized. If that individual has a high enough level of education, communication skills, work experience, and adaptability, that's the kind of individual our new selection model will be able to accept.

Mr. David Price: I'll give you another really very basic example. In my riding they're looking for several hundred woodworkers. The basic qualification for this is just somebody who is able to work with wood. If I look at our trip to Kenya, some people there are actually artists but would probably never be chosen. Yet they have an ability to work with wood, a very basic skill, but probably too basic as a criterion to be accepted as an immigrant. As a refugee they probably have a better chance in these cases; these people are refugees. Will our newer system be flexible enough to look at that situation?

The other thing we notice is the speed factor. As you mentioned, the world economy is changing at such a rapid pace, and we're not keeping up to it at all, because it takes too long to change our points system to match the needs.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Let me address that in two ways.

The issue of skilled tradespeople is an issue we're very mindful of in the work we're doing on the selection criteria, because we're concerned that if we raise the level of education too high, knowing education is a very critical factor in terms of successful establishment, we want to make sure we're not inadvertently cutting out the skilled trades. Skilled tradespeople don't have university degrees. They may have apprenticeship or trade certificates or other forms of education and training. So we do need to find that balance. That is one of the issues we continue to work through in our development of the new selection model.

• 1000

In terms of responsiveness and speed, we're certainly very well aware of and recognize the fact that our selection system overseas is not as fast as employers would like when they're looking for skilled tradespeople. We have tended to rely, and I think we will continue to rely, on our temporary worker program to really zero in on those labour shortages or skill shortages in specific areas of the economy.

The temporary foreign worker program is very much geared to labour market shortages in a way the selection system for permanent immigrants cannot be, and probably should not be. When we're selecting an immigrant, we're selecting somebody who is going to be entering the labour force and hopefully be a member of our labour force for a very long period of time—ten, twenty, or thirty years. As opposed to filling a specific labour market niche right now, in the next two years or whatever, they're going to be an active member of our labour force for a longer period of time, so we want to select them with that long-term view in mind.

The temporary foreign worker program, on the other hand, does allow us to target skill shortages and specific skill needs that employers or sectors of the economy may have. Part of our redesign of our temporary foreign worker program is in fact to work with industry and employers in partnership to try to identify what those skill shortages are and find ways to facilitate the entry more quickly of people on a temporary basis to fill those labour market shortages.

Mr. David Price: One thing I am happy to see at least on the temporary workers now is they can reapply from within Canada. That was a big problem we had before. We were losing people.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Yes.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Thanks, David.

Mr. Telegdi, I have to leave shortly, and I'd like to ask a few questions if I could. Would you mind?

Mr. Andrew Telegdi: Oh, certainly not.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Thanks, Andrew. I do appreciate that.

I want to follow up on Mr. Price's and Mr. Telegdi's questioning in a minute, but just on the numbers, in the chart you gave us entitled “Landings by Category, January to December, 1997-1999”, in the skilled workers category, the number given is 92,415, and in the total economic category it's 105,430. What number, by category, would actually be people who themselves have qualified—in other words, not including any kind of dependant? That's out of the skilled workers, the entrepreneurs, the self-employed, and the investors.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Kathleen is going to look to see whether we have that exact number. Our person-to-case ratio currently is 2.06, I think, which indicates the number of people per case. So if you looked at your person-to-case ratio, you would see that if you're looking at 2.06 people per case, that would be the principal applicant plus 1.06 dependants—spouse, partner, or dependent children. In terms of the people who are subject to the points system then, you're probably looking at about half of those people who would be principal applicants. But I don't know whether we have the exact number.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Half? If it were 2.06, it would be more like 40%, wouldn't it?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Yes.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): So we'd be looking at roughly 40,000 people who actually themselves have qualified or—

Ms. Joan Atkinson: —are subject to assessment under the selection system, correct.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Right, exactly. So that would be somewhere close to 20% when you're looking at the total immigration population.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: That's correct.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): They actually qualify based on the skills, the education, and other factors like that.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: That's correct, yes.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): I'd heard of a figure before of roughly 15%, so it's a little out of line, but not too bad.

I've been interested in the discussion and the way it's been going in terms of looking at people who've been accepted under the independent categories and just how quickly they do adapt to the Canadian workplace and to Canadian society and the impact that might have.

• 1005

Actually tomorrow night I'm releasing the Greater Toronto Area Immigration Task Force report. I've been working with a task force of about fifteen people in the Toronto area for the last year and a half. One of the key things I've found, from hearing from hundreds of people through this task force process, is that people are often misled by the consultants who recruit them, or by Canadians at foreign offices, about what to expect in the Canadian workplace. So they come with great expectations and are bitterly disappointed.

The impact that has on the family can be devastating. Once I was in an immigration lawyer's office in Toronto, and I met a man who had been an engineer in Pakistan. This was two years after they'd come. The husband told me his wife had said if she could find that consultant now, she'd kill him. She didn't mean it, but it's to make the point of how strongly this had impacted. And it's not only the low-paying job he's working at; it's the loss of status in the community. In Pakistan he had a high status in the community. The embarrassment to his family who he'd left and to him and his family in Canada was phenomenal.

I make a point of talking to cab drivers when I go to and from airports and other places. Some come as refugees and are very happy with their jobs. Certainly I appreciate cab drivers and the work they do, but many have come expecting far more. They've come as engineers with PhDs, with great credentials, and they're driving cabs and they're very unhappy. That shows there is a problem in targeting based on the likelihood of someone fitting quickly into the Canadian workplace.

One study that was referred to shows that in fact new immigrants, in the first five years, are only expected to make about 60% of the salary of Canadian-born, I believe. I might not be quite accurate on that, but I believe that was the comparison. And it was 80%, I believe, ten years ago. I may be not quite right on that too, but close. That shows an increasing problem.

I would like you to comment on this new system you're talking about. First of all I'd like you to explain the new system, because it's not in the act, so clearly it's something you're working on that we haven't been told about, though I'd heard it was happening. Could you comment on it?

And will this new system, in your mind, do a better job of focusing, for the sake of Canada—because clearly if we can get people working happily in the workplace, it's going to benefit the country more quickly—and for the families that are devastated when their expectations just aren't met?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Let me start off by correcting something I said. I said the person-to-case ratio was 2.06. It's actually 2.11. But in terms of getting at the proportion of immigrants who are actually subject to assessment against the selection criteria, we mentioned 15% or 20%. We're still talking about that neighbourhood.

Let me address your issue directly. As you pointed out, managing expectations of immigrants is certainly something we take very seriously. We need to take a two-pronged approach there.

First of all, in terms of the new selection system, as you rightly point out, people come through that selection system with sometimes unreasonable expectations, because we select them on the basis of an occupational title. We select them because they're an engineer or an accountant.

We're moving towards something that says, “We're not selecting you because you're an accountant or an engineer. We're selecting you because you have this basket of attributes. You have education, language skills, and work experience. You have proven your adaptability. We're selecting you because of your human capital. Because of that basket of goods and attributes, we believe you are going to be able to successfully establish in the labour market in whatever occupation you end up finding yourself in.”

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): So you're focusing more on general education, and you've mentioned language skills.

Ms. Joan Atkinson: That's right.

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The second prong, though, goes back to what we've been talking about: qualification recognition and access to trades and professions. Part of what we're working on with the provinces is getting better information, because when a skilled worker immigrant or a business immigrant makes the decision to move, that's a tremendous decision. It's a huge decision in your life to uproot yourself and your family and move to a new country, so it's important that you have the best information available about what you're going to face.

We no longer have the resources overseas to do one-on-one counselling sessions with immigrants. We have to be able to set up systems where we can get better information to prospective immigrants so that they can understand and know what barriers they will face in getting their qualifications recognized, for example. It's another part of our work with the provinces and territories to get better information in the hands of prospective immigrants so that they know what they have to do and what barriers they will face in getting their qualifications recognized.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Does the department not now, though, recognize certain universities or educational institutes? I understand there are certain universities where certain degrees are recognized as compatible. Is that not the case? Is that not a formal thing?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: No. Under the current selection system, we simply look at whether you have a university degree, and if you have a university degree, you are awarded so many points under our points system. It's not an equivalency. We don't look at whether that university degree is equivalent to a BA in Canada, for example. That's not part of our assessment process currently.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Wouldn't it be very useful to have some judgment made on the different universities? For example, I'd suggest in Pakistan you'd have a wide range in the quality of degrees issued. Wouldn't it be really beneficial to have a judgment made on that, so that you'd know that at least from this university, the education really is comparable to what you'd get in Canada as an engineer, for example?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Not only would it be very complicated and complex, but we certainly don't have the expertise in the immigration department to be able to do that sort of thing.

Maybe I'll ask Dougall to speak to that briefly, because again, this is part of some of the work that's being done with the provinces and territories on recognizing degrees as well.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Could I ask this first? Do the provinces then in some cases make a determination, even if it isn't formal, along this line? I don't remember who I talked to, but I've talked to a couple of different people who've mentioned that to me, and I assumed it was something done by the immigration department.

Mr. Dougall Aucoin: The universities do have academic qualifications assessment, which they do for anybody who applies to come to university, and some people have tried to get universities to assess their credentials before they come to Canada. But that's why it's been important for us to try to develop this infrastructure of independent bodies or provincial bodies that do credential assessment for any occupation and for any skill.

In terms of the immigration movement, though, what's been more important for us is to try to put information out there to encourage individuals who want to make that life move to get information before they come to Canada. So we've provided some products now out in the field that allow individuals to contact, for example, the Canadian Information Centre for International Credentials, which in turn will direct these individuals to appropriate professional bodies, trade bodies, or credential assessment centres to get information on what are the entry requirements in Canada to practise the type of skill they want to practise when they arrive. That doesn't give them the ticket they need, though, to get the job, and that's always a problem.

We can give a lot of information. Some professional organizations, for example, are not willing to make a commitment or license anybody before they arrive on the soil and they're able to see them, and see them in a work environment. But at the same time, if we can ensure that individuals are well informed about what they need to practise their professions in Canada and what are the labour market opportunities in Canada to practise their skills, that will go a long way towards meeting those expectations.

As a result of the conference we had last fall, we've been working with the partners to develop a new website, which would contain a vast array of information on the labour market, on what you need to participate actively in any province of Canada, on what you need if you want to address your needs from a professional or trade perspective, etc.

• 1015

Providing information to individuals before they come is part of the key, but making it a bar in our selection process will not be helpful either, because we cannot resolve the issues for the province and for the professional bodies that regulate those professions and trades at the end of the day.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): On that, the message was conveyed to me very clearly through this process that even if you in the department, from your overseas offices, tell people they'd better check out whether their credentials will be accepted in Canada, most people just won't heed the warning and won't accept it, even if it's given as a warning. They think, “Yeah, you're trying to discourage us, but we know it's better than you're saying.”

Mr. Dougall Aucoin: In fact we go further than that. We have in some instances asked clients to sign a declaration that they understand they may not be able to practise their profession in Canada. These are significant decisions, but at the end of the day a lot of the people are moving to Canada because there may be some push factors on their side. They want to improve their quality of life, and they're willing to risk a lot to improve their quality of life.

Once they arrive here, of course, they still feel they've been let down, because they themselves had the expectation that they'd be able to operate in our labour market and in our economy in a way in which they cannot fully participate.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Thank you very much, Mr. Aucoin. I apologize for my pronunciation of your name earlier. I read it wrong, actually.

I have to leave and someone has to take the chair. Mr. Telegdi, would you take the chair? I'm sure the others would allow you to ask your questions still as chair.

Mr. Andrew Telegdi: Thank you very much, Mr. Benoit. I think I speak for Mr. Price as well when I say this has been a wonderful committee meeting.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. Leon Benoit): Andrew, could you come up? Apparently there has to be someone up here. Thank you.

The Acting Chair (Mr. Andrew Telegdi): We're going to tell Mr. Fontana a new standard has been set.

Voices: Oh, oh!

The Acting Chair (Mr. Andrew Telegdi): If you will allow me, I was going to be questioning him.

Mr. Benoit mentioned taxi drivers, and it occurs to me one of the ways we can measure the integration survey is to test the taxi drivers and see how many of them are driving here with PhDs. Eventually, I hope, none will be.

As I mentioned before, we really are in a competition, and I think we're going to be more into a competition, for attracting immigrants. What has changed, which is going to be a real challenge, is this. I know when we came with our family back in the late 1950s, it was virtually prohibitive to phone back home where we came from. But the communications have increased so much.... Well, it's been just an incredible revolution.

Essentially, when we came—and this happened with people from all nations—you tended to integrate much more quickly, because you did have people from the same community in Canada, but then you were interacting with the greater Canadian society. Now you have the Internet, so you can go back with e-mails all the time, and you maintain those ties that you didn't maintain before. I just throw that out. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the future; it's certainly going to be a challenge.

Another thing I recognize when I walk around my community—and I'm sure we all would—is that we have some really successful people in our community who would never make it in under the present system. They're leaders in their fields in business, because that's the one field that's open to them. They really are great leaders in their fields in the communities. That's a real intangible. How can you evaluate that?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: Because immigration fundamentally deals with individual human beings, we must retain discretion in any immigration system, in any selection system. There's no way you're going to be able to fit all the round pegs into the square holes.

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You need to have a system that has the flexibility to allow individual decision-makers in that system to exercise their judgment. If someone does not fit the criteria but there's still an assessment that this individual will be able to successfully establish, we need to be able to allow people to use their judgment and their discretion to allow people to come forward.

And we intend to do that in our new selection model. We hope to make the selection criteria as clear and objective and transparent as we can, because it's important, not just for the decision-maker but for the intending immigrant, to know what are the requirements they have to meet. But we will continue to have discretion in the system to allow individual visa officers to make those sorts of judgments.

The Acting Chair (Mr. Andrew Telegdi): Thank you.

Mr. Price.

Mr. David Price: Thank you.

I have just a short question. You talked before about demographics. That's the basis of the whole thing we're looking at. Most of us have read Boom, Bust and Echo; in fact we tried to get David Foot here, and we're still hoping.

That leads me to this question. As I mentioned before, some groups out there have done their studies and say 95,000, and other groups have done their studies and say 500,000. So I'm going to put you on the spot and ask what you think of that. How do you reply to that, with your number in the middle?

Ms. Joan Atkinson: In all the various studies that have been done, a couple of themes emerge. The first theme is that immigration is a variable but a very important factor in determining population growth. We can see immigration has had a direct impact on growth in the population in Canada.

Two, we can see immigration has had a definite impact on the growth in the labour market. Some of the studies indicate immigration has contributed to up to 70% of the growth in the labour market. So we can see immigration has a direct impact.

In terms of the aging population, the evidence that comes through the research is much less definitive, if you will, in terms of the impact on the age structure of the population. The research does not indicate immigration is going to have a significant impact in terms of shifting the age structure of your population. What the research indicates is you would have to have very substantially—very substantially—higher numbers of immigration of working-age or even younger immigrants in order to really have an impact on the age structure of the population.

The age structure of the immigrants we are selecting is not that dissimilar to the age structure of the Canadian population. But what's clear, in terms of that dependency ratio and the age structure, is given the significant impact immigration has on growth in the labour market, certainly when you look at supporting that aging population, immigration is a factor—not the only factor, but clearly a factor—we have to look at when looking at the demographic future.

The Acting Chair (Mr. Andrew Telegdi): Okay. There are no more questions?

Mr. David Price: All I can say is, now I look forward to hearing from those people who are talking about the other end.

The Acting Chair (Mr. Andrew Telegdi): Thank you very much. This has been a real first: Mr. Benoit actually invited me to be in the chair.

Voices: Oh, oh!

Mr. David Price: We've finally found a way to control him.

Voices: Oh, oh!

The Acting Chair (Mr. Andrew Telegdi): We're adjourned until 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 10.