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

Friends, this is an important day. There is no more important issue for newcomers to Canada than overcoming the hurdles of credential recognition for foreign-trained professionals. Our government is absolutely focused on doing whatever we can to ensure that immigrants succeed in Canada's economy, that they find and keep good jobs, or start successful businesses.

People from around the world come to this land of opportunity to pass on to their children a better standard of living than they would have had in their country of origin. And it's regrettable, when we look at the data we see over the past three decades a general decline in economic outcomes for newcomers to Canada, unacceptably high levels of unemployment, too much under-employment, too many stuck in the trap of survival jobs, many facing the paradox of Canadian experience where they can't get a job without Canadian experience and they can't get that experience without a Canadian job.

Much of this comes down to the challenge of getting credentials recognized for the roughly 20 per cent of our immigrants who aspire to work in licensed professions. It's not an easy problem. If it was, governments would have solved it a long time ago. It's complicated by the fact that, of the roughly 45 licensed regulated professions, it's the provincial governments that oversee them. So just think about it, in a country with 10 provinces, each of which have about 45 licensing bodies, we're talking about 400... about 450 licensing and regulatory bodies for the professions across the country – the colleges of physicians, the law societies, the engineer's colleges, the dental colleges, and so forth – and each one of them having their own process and their own standards.

So it is a complex problem. And, of course, Canadians don't expect our licensing bodies to lower standards. They want to maintain high Canadian professional standards, as they should, but here's the problem: too many of those licensing bodies have created procedures for assessing foreign credentials that are just too bureaucratic, too time-consuming, and often unfair. And all we as the federal government are asking is that the licensing bodies give newcomers a fair shot in a reasonable amount of time. That's all newcomers expect when they come here with their high levels of education and experience from their countries of origin.

So our government has undertaken a number of measures as Minister Finley has mentioned. Firstly, in 2006, we created the Foreign Credential Referral Office in Citizenship and Immigration Canada, with an investment of some $30 million which created a very important program that SUCCESS has helped us to deliver overseas.

This is the Canadian Immigration Integration Project that is providing free counselling and training to economic immigrants before they get to Canada, to give them a head start so they don't arrive and find themselves stuck in trying to figure how to find a job and apply for their credentials.

Now about 85 per cent of our economic immigrants are invited to attend a free two-day seminar with personalized counselling on how to find a job in Canada, how to apply for credentials online from overseas to get a head start, and how to navigate their way through the Canadian labour market. Tens of thousands of people have benefited from this program, and I'd like to thank SUCCESS for helping us to deliver it in, I believe, in Taipei and in Seoul for Taiwanese and Korean immigrants.

It's also delivered by the Canadian Association of Community Colleges in other offices around the world. Our data indicates that this program has been a huge success, that people who have gone through the integration project overseas are getting higher levels of employment, better jobs, and a better head start when they get to Canada. That's the first thing we did.

The second, and very important thing was, for the first time in the history of our federation, the Prime Minister put the issue of foreign credentials on the national agenda with all 10 provincial premiers. He did so in the First Ministers’ Meeting in 2009, and he managed to get an agreement, as Minister Finley mentioned, for a national approach to streamlining, simplifying, and speeding up the assessment of foreign credential recognition.

Also, as Minister Finley mentioned, the commitment that we are getting from each of the professional bodies is to do that within a year. Again, we’re not lowering standards, but simplifying the process and speeding it up. And in fact this is more than just some kind of rhetorical political commitment. In the 2009 budget, the government committed $50 million to the development of this national framework for the assessment of foreign qualifications that Minister Finley is leading with her 10 provincial colleagues.

You know what? It's not an easy thing to explain. This is hard, detailed work. You're dealing with dozens of different professional bodies on really technical issues, so it's it’s not an easy simple thing to put in a window and say ‘this is solving the problem right away,’ because it's not. But what it is doing is bringing all of those engineering colleges, all of those law societies, and all of the other bodies together around one national table with, frankly, some political leadership and pressure, to say ‘get with the program, open the door to opportunity, stop keeping a closed labour market, give newcomers a fair shot.’ And I want to commend Minister Finley for her leadership in this respect.

The third important initiative is what's being announced today. Initially the money was set aside in the budget as part of the next phase of Canada's Economic Action Plan last year, and I was pleased, on behalf of the Prime Minister, to make the commitment, here in Vancouver with Wai Young last April, that the Government would launch a program to help provide for bridge financing through microloans and other support to foreign-trained professionals, so they could upgrade their skills when they get to Canada in order to get their credentials recognized.

Minister Finley has explained the problem very well and I'll tell you, as Minister of Immigration, not a day goes by when I don't meet a newcomer who has a moving, often tragic story about how they got to this country. They were filled with hope and aspiration, with an amazing professional background, and yet they ran into the brick wall.

A few months ago, I was in Red Deer, Alberta, at a public meeting, and I'll never forget it. I met a Latin American immigrant and his wife who were both trained dentists from, I believe, Columbia. They both had years of practice, but he was working as a janitor in Red Deer. And he broke down in tears. Their story also reminded me of a Syrian physician I met in Edmonton who had been in Canada for six years cleaning hotel rooms. We all know the stories, and they touch us all. And that's why we must do more. That’s what today's announcement is about.

Let me just say that the impetus for this excellent program that Minister Finley is leading came about through a pilot program being supported by my ministry, the Alberta Immigrant Access Fund. A great group of volunteers and philanthropists saw a problem and, in the classic western spirit, they didn't wait for the government to come along to fix it, they decided to jump in and find a solution. So they connected philanthropists who were willing to sign lines of credit to backup loans, and they set up an operation to identify newcomers who needed to pay for skills upgrading. They went to a bank and said: ‘would you, with these lines of credit that have been signed, facilitate low interest loans for people who otherwise couldn't get credit because they don't have Canadian credit ratings.’ They worked it out and it's been a phenomenal success.

On the Alberta Immigrant Access Fund’s website, you'll see the data. I think there’s been a 97 per cent repayment rate. People going from working in minimum wage jobs in convenience stores to making $40 an hour as accountants and so forth. It's working. People don’t need a handout, they need a hand up. Because they're struggling to put food on the table for their family, they don't have any savings because they depleted them getting over here, and they need an extra few courses, maybe a degree or diploma, to get that credential recognized so they can get into the job market properly. And that’s what these pilot programs are designed to address.

Now this is just the beginning. I mean these are pilot projects, but we want to make sure that we are spending these dollars responsibly. Minister Finley’s ministry has selected some very good partnering agencies, including SUCCESS, to do this work with us. So I want to commend SUCCESS, the Alberta and Saskatchewan Immigrant Access Fund, and all the other groups that are partnering with us.

I want to thank you, Minister Finley, for your tenacity and leadership on this issue. And we just want to reiterate that we are absolutely committed to opening up the opportunity that this country presents to the hundreds of thousands of newcomers. We are maintaining the highest levels of sustained immigration in Canadian history, and we are among the highest per capita levels in the developed world. But numbers aren't good enough. It's about the quality of the experience, not just the quantity of people who enter Canada. And so this is about ensuring that the economic opportunity is there.

So thank you very much.