Speaking notes for John McCallum, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship at an Event Hosted by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce

Speech

Toronto, Ontario
April 4, 2016

As delivered

Thank you. Well, Mr. Newly Appointed President, Madam Newly Appointed Senator, Minister Chan, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It is a great pleasure for me to be with you today. Sorry I was a little late. The Gardiner was more of a parking lot than it normally is, which underlines the need for infrastructure, but that’s another topic.

I would like to say one thing about refugees. And that is to thank the business community for everything that you have done, not only in terms of financial contributions, but also in terms of job offers.

So I would say the business community through various Chambers of Commerce has done great work. We’ve raised – you’ve raised over $30 million. The first priority was housing, but with over 80 percent of them housed permanently now, I think now the top priority is teaching language, which is more a government role, but also getting jobs. So I do thank you for what you’re already done. I would be most grateful if you did even more. But that’s all I’m going to say about refugees in my comments.

As was pointed out, I’m an economist. I understand the importance of immigration for the well-being of the Canadian economy, the growth and prosperity of Canadians and so that is what I want to focus on and I want to try to answer as much of your report’s recommendations as I can, which is quite a lot.

First, though, let me say that in terms of levels of immigration, we’ve announced 300,000 for the current year, which I will tell you is the absolute maximum capacity of the department, no matter how much more money you might put in this year. I want to increase that capacity going forward, but right now, that’s the most we can have. And so we had to make room for the refugees, also spouses because the processing times are horrendous, so there was a small and temporary reduction in the federal stream of economic immigrants. Provincial nominees held constant, but only temporary. We are going to be launching a consultation process for 2017, ‘18, ‘19 — all together, three years — in coming months involving clearly the business community as well as other stakeholders. And you can be sure that there will be significant increases in what’s called economic immigrants, although I’m going to say something about that term in a minute.

So yes, federal-provincial cooperation is going very well. Let me just mention a couple of highlights from our last meeting. First of all, economy agrees that international students have been shortchanged by the current system, and that has to be fixed. It will be fixed, and my provincial colleagues and I are all in agreement on that. In fact, I have not met anyone who disagrees with that proposition, and I meet a lot of people.

Second, you all know that credentials issues — doctors driving taxis — have been a problem for decades. It is in provincial jurisdiction, but I was delighted when the Quebec Minister proposed a federal-provincial meeting to discuss best practices in this area, so that is not something directly or even indirectly under federal control, but we will certainly convene that meeting because it is a really important issue.

I also want to say that I proposed — and nobody disagreed — that we change the way we measure the contribution of immigrants to the economy. The statistic percentage of economic immigrants as a percent of the total makes no sense. What you really want to know is how many of the immigrants are actually working and contributing to the economy. So the way we’re going to measure that is recently arrived or not-so-recently arrived immigrants as a percent of employment or as a percent of the labour force in every province and we can track that by degree of skill, by how long we’ve been here and that’s what will tell you the real truth.

Every immigrant is an economic immigrant. It makes no sense to say one is economic and everybody else is non-economic, which means non-productive, does it? So we let in the economic ones because they’ll do good for the economy. The other ones are a frill because we’re nice people. That is wrong. Economic immigrants include spouses of principal applicants who may not work, family members. It being 2016, both spouses typically work. Even grandparents who may not be in the labour force, by looking after children, enable both parents to work. And our experience has been that the big majority of refugees work, so we don’t like this term – I don’t like this term economic immigrants. Maybe we’ll call it independent immigrants or something else, but it’s not that there’s one productive class and everyone else is unproductive. And to measure the contribution of immigrants, we will look at the percentage of new immigrants in the workforce in various categories and over various time periods.

So let me now come to the recommendations. The first one was greater flexibility of the PNP and you want to have more base people and less Express Entry people. Well, that’s precisely what we’ve done this year for Ontario. Ontario has 1,000 more base people, which means Ontario can pretty well admit who they want, and less of the Express Entry people, which means that they have to obey the Express Entry rules. So that’s what you asked for; that’s what we’ve given.

But the implication of this report is in order of priority across businesses their first choice would be temporary foreign workers. Their second choice would be base cased provincial nominee, and their third choice would be Express Entry. Well, that’s precisely the opposite of the order of choice that I would prefer and that means that we at the federal level will work very hard to make Express Entry, the federal stream, more attractive to business, better for Canada, so that more businesses will want to use that stream.

We’re less keen on the temporary foreign worker stream because we want permanent residents. We want people who become Canadians, not guest workers. Now there’s room for some temporary foreign workers, especially if they have the pathway to permanent residence, but we prefer, by a long shot, permanent residents. I also do not want to be the Immigration Minister who presides over the disappearance of the federal role in immigration. If you look at the data, maybe 10 years ago a quarter of the so-called economic immigrants were provincial nominees. Now it’s half. At this rate, there’ll be no federal role going forward. I want to improve Express Entry, so that companies will want to use it and then we will have less, hopefully, continuous demand from provinces for more provincial nominees if we can make the federal stream more efficient and effective for the country.

Second, you want to remove the LMIA requirement for Express Entry. We haven’t made a formal decision, but I agree. That doesn’t mean we’re going to do it, but that means we’re inclining to do it and we’re going to study it and we’re going to have a decision in the not-too-distant future, so you pretty well sold me on that for the reasons given in the report, but you have to make sure it’s a legitimate job offer, so there has to be some alternative instrument in there — possibly the one that the Ontario government has. So we will be looking at that quite intensely.

Now increase awareness. Of course we want to increase awareness. There’s something called the Employer Liaison Network, which maybe hasn’t been doing such a great job — no offence to them, but you know, businesses don’t know about Express Entry enough. But it’s not just to make them aware. It’s not just to communicate, it’s also to improve the product, right? You don’t want to communicate something that isn’t the best. You want to make the thing better and then communicate it or do both at the same time. So I’ve already said we agree with you on LMIA, but it’s not a formal announcement.

But the second point which I mentioned earlier is international students. We want to make Canada more welcoming for international students because I cannot think of a group that is likely to become good Canadians than international students who, by definition, are educated, by definition know something of the country, by definition speak one or other of French and English. And so this is very fertile ground. There’s competition around the world. We want to up our game. And so probably that means giving them more points in Express Entry. There’s some work to do. How many? How do you define them? Should we have a quota of international students instead of more points? We’re going to look at those things, but one way or another, we’re going to make it more attractive for international students.

The next thing you talk about is the processing time for international students is too long. Well, let me tell you that is not a surprise. The processing time for everything is too long, except Express Entry. I think there we have kept it to six months, but the processing times are way too long for spouses, for parents and grandparents, for caregivers. There’s some improvement on citizenship applicants and for students. So we are going to work very hard to improve all that. It’s not going to happen overnight, but one thing we learned from the refugee experience is that when we sent 500 people over there, they learned how to process things fast without giving up anything on the security front. They learned to do things consecutively instead of concurrently — do A, B and C at the same time, instead of do A and then B and then C — and to eliminate steps that are unnecessary. So we will apply that thinking more generally and hopefully speed up processing times across the board.

I think that might be the end of my time and I think that’s pretty well the end of what I have to say except your final component about the Canada-Ontario Agreement and reopening offices that the Conservatives closed, I can’t promise that we’ll do that. We’ll look at it. And we haven’t entered into discussions with Ontario about COIA, and so I can’t really say much about that, but I will say that even though I live in Ontario, even though the Ontario Immigration Minister is a friend of mine, I don’t want an agreement that favours Ontario at the expense of other provinces. I want an agreement across the board that is fair to all provinces, and so that is what we will be working to achieve.

So I think I’ve answered a good chunk of your questions. I’d be happy when the time comes to answer more, but I thank you very much for your attention.

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