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

Thank you to the Canadian Club for welcoming me here to this prestigious Toronto platform for the first time. I’m honoured to be here to talk about something that is hugely important to all of us, to this big welcoming and prosperous country.

We as Canadians have much to be grateful for. In a time of global economic uncertainty when we see countries in Europe teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, even the Chinese economy slowing and deep fiscal and economic problems south of the border, we can be grateful that thanks to the hard work of Canadians and some sound policy choices that we are leading the world in so many respects – in the G7 with the soundest fiscal environment, with according to Forbes magazine the best business environment in the world today, according to the World Economic Forum the most stable banking and financial sector with the only or the first G8 country to have replaced all of the jobs lost during the recessionary period seeing the creation of more than 610,000 net new jobs in the past 18 months.

We stand poised for the future to continue that record of growth and prosperity. That is something our government will be very focused on in the Economic Action Plan expressed in the upcoming federal budget. As the Prime Minister has said, a key part of that action plan will be reforming our immigration programs to do more, to do better in ensuring that our historic openness to newcomers works to fuel prosperity in Canada’s economy because we want an immigration system that works for newcomers and works for Canada.

When that happens, we all succeed. As the Prime Minister said in his major address at the World Economic Forum in January, “in the months to come our government will undertake major transformations to position Canada for growth over the next generation including significant reform of our immigration system. We will ensure that while we respect our humanitarian obligations and our family reunification objectives that we make our economic and labour force needs the central goal of our immigration efforts in the future.”

I’m here to talk to you today about how our immigration system can play that larger role in economic growth. We have a bit of a problem that we’ve been experiencing now for 30 years and increasingly today. The problem is really a paradox. Canada is experiencing huge and growing labour shortages. In fact, in many parts of this country, in many industries, the number one economic concern and barrier is a shortage of workers for jobs that are available.

That’s why we have been maintaining high levels of immigration. In fact, throughout the global economic downturn, many other developed countries slashed immigration levels as Canada did before in its history. In the early 1980’s recession the government cut immigration levels almost in half. Again in the mid-1990’s, the government reduced immigration levels, from 250,000 to 175,000 over two years. 

They did so because the conventional wisdom in Canada used to be, and still is in many other developed countries, that when the labour market tightens when you’re in a recessionary period, you reduce the inflow of immigrants to ensure that unemployed citizens are first in the queue for the available jobs. That made sense in those contexts. But now, with our aging population, with our shrinking workforce and with long term prospects for sustained growth, we know that in Canada the greater challenge will be – and already is – labour shortages.

Here is the paradox. While we have huge and growing labour shortages in many industries and regions, we see at the same time many new Canadians stuck in unemployment or underemployment and the goal of our immigration policy reforms will be to bridge that gap, so that new Canadians arrive here as much as possible to go fully and productively into the workforce where they can care for their families, enjoy the dignity of work, work at their skill level and contribute to our economy.

We all know the positive myth of immigration to Canada. It’s part of who we are. Just think of Clifford Sifton’s archetypal recruitment posters that offered free land and drew millions to Canada as the last best west. The last best west is what drew millions of immigrants here. Think of Samuel de Champlain or those fleeing the Irish famine in the 19th century, part of that long narrative of migration. Think of the Sikh lumber workers and Chinese railroad labourers who came here. 

These are the people that helped to settle this land, drawn here by posters that read, “Canada, the most fertile country in the world.” Generations of immigrants came here with a relentless work ethic to make our land one of unparalleled and limitless potential, the true north strong and free. Is that myth completely true today? We continue to be an open and welcoming country. As I said, we have welcomed extraordinarily high levels of immigration.

In fact, in the past five years, we have admitted on average over a quarter of a million new permanent residents, the highest sustained levels of immigration in Canadian history, representing just under 0.8% of our population added each year through immigration. That’s among the highest per capita level in the developed world while, at the same time, many countries like Australia and the UK have been cutting immigration levels.

Notwithstanding these high levels of immigration, there are of course still infinitely more people around the world who dream of beginning a new life in Canada. In fact, according to a global Angus Reid survey a couple of years ago, at least two billion people around the world would like to immigrate to Canada. That’s what I call a good problem to have.

Unfortunately, as open and as welcoming as we are, we can’t accept all of them – at least not all at once. That means Canada must be selective about who we choose to enter the country. Of course, we seek to do so in a way that is balanced. We have humanitarian obligations to refugees which we give practical expression to by accepting more than one out of every ten resettled UN Convention refugees from around the world.

We have the highest level now of resettlement of Convention refugees per capita in the world and we’re actually increasing our resettlement targets by 20 per cent and the integration support we give those newcomers by 20 per cent.  Of course, we have large and generous, I think the most generous family reunification policies in the world.  In fact only about two out of every ten immigrants to Canada are assessed based on their human capital as primary economic immigrants.

When it comes to selecting those primary economic immigrants, we must be sure that we’re choosing the people who are most likely to succeed in Canada. You all know the data, I suspect. Over the course of the past three to four decades, we have seen a regrettable decline in economic results for newcomers to Canada, lower levels of employment, higher levels of unemployment; lower incomes, higher levels of social dependency.

While there’s an interesting debate between think tanks and scholars on quantifying exactly the degree to which we have seen a diminishment of economic results for newcomers, every paper and every piece of research I’ve seen on this agrees that, over the course of the past 30 years, newcomers on average have received more in fiscal transfers than they have contributed economically. That is not to say – and I emphasize this – that is not to say that newcomers have not contributed enormously to Canada in so many ways.

We can see just in this room the extraordinary success of people from all around the world, including people who didn’t come with high levels of education. But here’s the point. For too long the story of immigration to Canada has been summed up by the frustration of the highly-trained professional who arrived with the expectation of being able to work at his or her skill level, only to find themselves frustrated by the barriers to employment, particularly in licensed professions, only to find themselves having to resort to working in survival jobs, facing underemployment.

You know these people. We all do. I’ve heard so many heartbreaking stories, people literally breaking down in front of me like the couple from Colombia I met in Red Deer, Alberta, both of them highly-trained dentists who were working as janitors in Red Deer. Or the Syrian-trained obstetrician I met in Vancouver who had for five years been cleaning hotel rooms. Or the proverbial cab driver we all meet who has that engineering or medical degree.

To too great an extent that has become the symbol of the failure of our economic immigration policies. There are many successes that we must celebrate, but we must have a frank discussion about fundamental reform to our immigration programs to ensure that everyone who arrives in this country has an equal opportunity to succeed.  Because not only is there an opportunity cost for those who arrive and face underemployment.

There’s also a human and incalculable social and personal cost. Every one of those people who feel frustrated that they’re not getting the equal shot – that they’re locked out by an impossibly byzantine credential recognition process whose degrees or experience are not being recognized by Canadian employers – they go home at night and feel depressed and ashamed because they brought their family here to not pursue the kind of opportunity they dreamed of. 

We know those families and those circumstances. They tough it out. They work incredibly hard. They contribute enormously and they do so with a dream and aspiration that their children will have a future in Canada that they never could have in their country of origin. That remains absolutely true.

I don’t think it’s good enough for us to say ‘wait for your children to do well.’ I think we must look at the data, look at the reality and reform our economic immigration programs to ensure that, as little as possible, newcomers face that vicious cycle of underemployment or unemployment and disappointment that goes with it. Now there are things that we know.  We’ve done some major research in this area. We’ve just completed a major study of our key federal economic immigration program called The Federal Skilled Worker Program. That’s the points system.

We know which factors are most likely to lead to early employment and higher levels of income and economic fulfillment.  For example, we know that younger immigrants tend to do better than older immigrants. Of course, there are always exceptions to these rules, but I’m talking about the general lessons from the data. We know that people who have Canadian work experience obviously do better than those who don’t. We know that people who have pre-arranged jobs in Canada before they get here do phenomenally well.

In fact, based on our recent study, at three years after arrival skilled workers who had a pre-arranged job are earning $79,000 in average salaries after just three years, much higher than the average in the population. When you look at the overall level of unemployment for immigrants, it is almost twice as high as for the average population.  For recent immigrants with university degrees it’s four times higher than amongst native born Canadians with university degrees.

Again we have to look at those factors which we know lead to giving people a better shot. That’s why, in the year to come, we will be making important reforms to our economic immigration programs. We will be reforming, modifying the points grid that is the basis for selecting federal skilled workers, to put more emphasis on younger workers, on those with pre-arranged employment, on those with higher levels of language proficiency, if they seek to come into regulated professions.

At the same time, we’ll be creating greater flexibility. One of the criticisms of our programs in the last three decades has been that they’ve basically made it virtually impossible for skilled tradespeople to get access to Canada as immigrants, even though there are huge and growing labour shortages in the skilled trades like construction trades and the like. We intend to create a new skilled trades stream that allows those talented welders in construction trades, boiler makers and welders who have huge skills in much demand, who are paid very good salaries, to be able to come to Canada and in principle step off the plane directly into gainful employment.

We have already made important reforms, particularly through the creation of the Canadian Experience Class that allows foreign students who have obtained a two-year degree or diploma in Canada, or foreign workers who have done two years of work at a mid to high skill level to obtain permanent residency from within Canada on a fast track basis. We’re going to add even additional flexibility to that program. By the way, that program makes so much sense.

Can you believe in the past we used to tell foreign students who would invest in a degree in Canada, at the end of their diploma or degree ,we would say ‘thanks very much. You’ve now perfected your English or French language skills. You have a degree that will be recognized by Canadian employers. You might already have a job lined up here, but please leave the country and, if you want to immigrate, get in the back of a seven year long queue and we’ll be in touch with you.’ That was the definition of stupidity. Now we’ve opened up the opportunity for those people to stay in Canada on a fast track basis. We’re going to make that program more flexible as part of our reforms.

On Saturday, on St. Patrick’s Day, I met with the Irish Deputy Prime Minister, who is in town to open the Irish Canadian Immigration Centre. We are welcoming tens of thousands of young people from around the world through our work mobility programs, our working holidays, including 5,500 per year from Ireland. This is a microcosm of the sort of thing that we’re doing. These are incredibly bright young people, many of them with degrees as engineers or architects, advanced skills with 25 per cent unemployment in their home country coming to Canada on one or two year working holidays work permits.

If they get a good job in Canada and they want to stay, we don’t let them in our current rigid system. Instead, we tell them to leave. We’re looking at reducing the threshold for qualifying for the Canadian experience class for foreign workers from two years to one year so that, if you’re an employer here in Toronto who has one of these bright young Irish or other kids on a working holiday visa and you give them a job offer, in principle they should be able to stay.

This is what I’m talking about, moving from a slow, rigid and very passive immigration system to one that is fast, flexible and proactive. We must begin to empower employers and the business community to play a greater role in looking at the worldwide labour market to fill labour shortages. We as a government must facilitate that. The typical experience of our immigration programs in the past has been a passive and slow moving one. People from abroad expressing an interest in coming to Canada, filing an application and then they forget about it for seven or eight years as their application slowly crawls through our old paper-based bureaucratic system.

Often, by the time we get to it, they’re seven or eight years older to begin with.  Perhaps their skills are not as relevant to the ones we need. They certainly didn’t have a job offer eight years ago that’s still fresh in the Canadian labour market today. Where we need to go to is a system where a Canadian employer can say ‘these are the individuals abroad who we know have the skills to work upon arrival in Canada.’ We will offer them that job and then the deal on the part of the government will be to facilitate their admission into this country as soon as possible.

In order to move from the slow and rigid system to a fast and flexible one, we need to deal with the big legacy problem of the huge backlogs that we inherited in our immigration system. Frankly, they came about just as a result of bad policy choices.  Like I said, there is virtually an infinite number of people who would like to migrate here, but a finite number of people we can accept. Unfortunately, our system didn’t recognize that. It was open ended to an infinite number of applications with an obligation to process each and every one of them.

Some years we were getting 400,000 to 500,000 immigration applications when, for example, we were accepting on average 220,000 people. What did that mean? Every year another couple of hundred thousand people ended up queuing up, waiting to get on the plane to Canada with a ticket they thought they had acquired. We ended up now with a backlog of a million people and an average, across our programs, seven year wait time.

This means that the brightest young graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad who might be the next Bill Gates or brilliant wealth-creating entrepreneur can get into Australia or New Zealand in six months, but has had to wait for years and years to come to Canada. We created a rigid system which meant that we were losing the competition for the world’s best and brightest. 

We must unburden ourselves of that kind of slow and rigid system. We have taken measures through our Action Plan for Faster Immigration that have helped. We’ve managed to cut in half the old federal skilled worker backlog, but there are still almost 300,000 applications sitting there, many of them barely moving up the queue. We must take additional action in that regard.

Finally, we must also continue to ensure that newcomers are going to where the jobs are. That doesn’t just mean geographically. It also means the businesses and the industries that are in need of talented immigrants. We have succeeded in beginning that process with a much better geographic distribution of newcomers across the country.  For example, in the past five years, we’ve seen immigration to Saskatchewan quadruple, Manitoba triple, Alberta double and Atlantic Canada double.

It’s true that relatively fewer newcomers are settling in Toronto and in Ontario than was the case a few years ago, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing because now Ontario is getting the number of newcomers that is proportionate to its share of the Canadian population. And many newcomers, through the provincial nominee programs that we’ve expanded, are going straight into pre-arranged jobs in areas where there are red hot labour markets and doing quite well.

These changes, friends, are not about some kind of ideological agenda on immigration.  It’s about driving immigration reform through data and research. We’ve done a major research study on the Provincial Nominee Program showing that they are working well.  In the initial years, the provincial nominees who were typically going to the west, are doing considerably better than Federal skilled workers, again because that program typically is based on a pre-arranged offer of employment.

We should learn from the success of that program. I can tell you, even with those big increases, employers are frustrated. I was just out in southeastern Saskatchewan where they say they offer jobs to Canadians all across the country.  They come and do recruitment fairs in Ontario and points east and Canadians won’t accept very good paying jobs.  We’re not talking about unskilled. We’re talking about the entire skill spectrum ,from farm workers at $25 an hour all the way up to lawyers. Can you believe it? They have a shortage of lawyers in Saskatchewan.

Some of you Bay Street lawyers may want to think about moving west. Seriously, it’s a good problem for them to have, I suppose. Why aren’t we creating an immigration program that would allow those Saskatchewan law firms, if they can’t find a Canadian to take the work, to identify someone abroad who they know has the education and the experience to walk in and be able to work productively?

Through all of these changes that we will be making to reduce the backlogs, to improve our selection of skilled workers, to continue getting a better geographic distribution of newcomers, to empower employers to proactively select skilled workers, we’ll also be looking at major reforms for investor immigrant and entrepreneurial programs, to make sure Canada is getting the biggest bang for the buck possible through those programs that hold enormous potential.

There are millions of millionaires who would love to come and contribute to this country. Our unifying vision is very simple. We want to leave behind the rigidity and, in so many respects, the failure of the past to a system that is fast, flexible and proactive. Because, at the end of the day, what matters most is that the newcomers who arrive with the promise of prosperity in Canada realize it and do so quickly because we all know that when immigrants succeed, Canada succeeds.

Our government will continue to maintain Canada’s historic generosity and openness.  We will continue to lead the world as a land of opportunity for newcomers, but all of us–  the nonprofit sector, the business community and government— must work towards transformational change of our immigration programs, to ensure that the positive myth of immigration to Canada is renewed and that newcomers who arrive are confident that they won’t have to merely struggle; that they will indeed succeed.

Thanks very much.