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

Thanks very much, everyone, for the chance to talk with you about a very important issue for the future of the Canadian economy, and for hundreds of thousands of new Canadians: Foreign credential recognition.

I’m really delighted to be here for this because it’s such a hugely important issue for me, for my Ministry and our government. Thank you for that kind introduction, Corinne, and thank you for your good work at the Foreign Credential Referral Office at CIC.

Friends, you’re gathering together to discuss a critically important issue for the future of our economy and our labour markets at a very interesting time, because tomorrow my colleague, the Honourable Jim Flaherty, will present the Next Phase of Canada’s Economic Action Plan in the 2012 federal budget – a budget that will focus on jobs and growth, a budget that will focus on transformational change for the long term, and that will get things right in many areas to fuel our prosperity well into the future.

One of the areas where we know we must make transformational change is in the area of immigration policy. For too long in our country, we have received newcomers only to see them face unemployment or underemployment – paradoxically at the same time that we have large and growing labour shortages in our economy.  This just doesn’t make any sense. Beginning with tomorrow’s budget and policy reforms throughout the course of the next year, we will be making fundamental improvements to the immigration programs to better attract people who are sure to succeed in Canada’s labour market, and to help Canada succeed in global economic competition.

That’s really partly what I’m here to talk to you about today. You all know the problems. First of all, Canada has maintained its tradition as a country of openness and opportunity for newcomers. Since 2006, our government has proudly welcomed, on average, over 250,000 new permanent residents each year, and an increasing number of temporary workers, including foreign students, youth mobility program participants, and others who have helped us fuel Canada’s prosperity.

We’ve maintained historic high levels – in fact, the highest sustained level of immigration in Canadian history – while also maintaining the highest per capita level of immigration in the developed world. This is counterintuitive. In most other developed countries, we’ve seen immigration levels frozen or cut – in some quite dramatically, like for example in the United Kingdom and now pretty significantly in Australia.

The reason that we maintained high levels of immigration even during the recessionary period, unlike Canadian governments in the past, was because of the Prime Minister’s conviction that labour shortages are a deep and structural problem in the Canadian economy and will only become worse as our population ages.  We are depending on immigration as one of the solutions to the problem of large and growing labour shortages. I can tell you I was just last week in Alberta and British Columbia, a couple of weeks before that in Saskatchewan, and I’m constantly consulting with employers and industry sectors.

I can tell you that the number one problem in the Canadian economy, in many regions and industries, is the problem of labour shortages. This is right across the whole spectrum. I was in southeast Saskatchewan three weeks ago, where farm operators were telling me that they were having a hard time getting unskilled manual labourers to do basic farm work for $25 an hour. I was speaking to the CEO of Tenaris, a large multinational steel pipeline manufacturer that’s operating in northern Alberta. They’re thinking of locating abroad because they can’t find people with merely a high school education to work for $26 an hour. 

Just this morning, I heard a briefing from the Alberta Hoteliers Association about thousands of unfilled jobs in that growing element of the hospitality industry.  Back to southern Saskatchewan, they were telling me it’s not just about unskilled farm labourers, but the skill shortages are right across the spectrum from mechanics to heavy equipment operators to geologists, engineers, to lawyers, if you can believe it –the first time I’ve ever thought of the idea of a shortage of lawyers.  Most people would probably say that’s a good problem.

Believe it or not, I met a law firm in Weyburn, Saskatchewan that had brought in South African lawyers as temporary foreign workers to help them carry the work burden that they have. This is not just regional and it’s not just cyclical. Everyone with whom I consult is confident that we are on the cusp of a significant long-term boom, particularly in the resource and commodity industries of Canada. This boom will carry on for many, many years to come, just as our population begins to shrink and as the boomers begin to retire.

It is not merely a western issue. It’s an issue throughout the country. Even in certain regions of eastern Canada, where there’s a fairly high unemployment rate, there’s a need for temporary foreign workers. The Prime Minister told me that he was recently in the Saguenay region of Quebec and that there were certain employers in the hospitality industry who said there is a labour shortage.

I hear the same thing among the owners of construction companies in Toronto. There is a paradox here because we have a labour shortage of several tens of thousands of workers throughout the country. We have maintained the highest immigration levels in our history, and the unemployment rate among Canadian newcomers is 14%. That means twice as high as the unemployment rate of the general population.

What’s going on here? Why is it that even in this economy we see immigrants having an unemployment rate twice as high as the general population and three times higher for those with university degrees compared to Canadians with degrees? It doesn’t make any sense.

We all know that one of the reasons is that our immigration system has been slow, passive and rigid. It has not done an adequate job of inviting to Canada those people who have the skills that are relevant to our labour shortages in a timely fashion.  Beginning with changes in the budget, we will be – throughout the course of the next year – making transformational improvements to our selection of economic immigrants.

This will cover a number of areas. We will, as I have indicated, be dealing decisively with the problem of huge and growing backlogs.  Thankfully, we’ve finally turned the corner.  Had we not begun using the tool of Ministerial Instructions to control the intake of new applications, we would now be looking at a total immigration backlog of about 1.5 million. Instead, the total backlog is one million and it’s finally starting to come down for the first time in at least a generation. That’s good news.

The bad news is that in the skilled worker program, we still have some 400,000 people waiting, with the older applicants waiting for up to seven years to get an answer on their application. It’s just not fair to ask someone overseas – a highly trained professional – to put their life on hold for seven years while we get around to their application, simply because in the past we poorly managed this system by having no limits on the applications.

We will deal decisively with the large legacy backlogs that we inherited so that we can go to a just-in-time fast immigration system that brings people to Canada when their skills are fresh, when they have a job lined up ideally, and in a very timely fashion.  Secondly, we will be making significant improvements to the points grid for the selection of federal skilled workers, based on the research we have done. As you know, in the last year, we’ve done a major study on the effectiveness of the Federal Skilled Worker Program, as well as the Provincial Nominee Program.

What we have found confirms all of the other research and data on immigration outcomes, which is that younger immigrants tend to do better. Immigrants with higher levels of official language proficiency do much better. Immigrants with Canadian, as opposed to overseas, work experience do much better. And immigrants who have prearranged jobs when they arrive in Canada do extraordinarily well. 

In fact, our study concluded that skilled workers who arrive with a prearranged job are earning $79,000 as an average salary in their third year in Canada, significantly higher than the average Canadian salary. We’re going to take that data and apply it to the new points grid by awarding more points to younger workers, to those with Canadian work experience, and to people with higher levels of language proficiency, particularly those aspiring to work in regulated professions. We know the outcomes will be better.

We’ve already made important changes, as you know, with the introduction and expansion of the Provincial Nominee Program, which has resulted in a much better geographic distribution of newcomers, and pretty darn good results for the initial years for provincial nominees, who typically are arriving with prearranged jobs. That’s a success story. And of course through our introduction of the Canadian Experience Class in 2009, which is in my view the model immigration program, we have the first new pathway to permanent residency in a generation,

I can’t believe the number of people who still haven’t heard about it. I was in Vancouver the other day, and a university president said to me, “When are you going to start letting our foreign student grads stay in Canada as permanent residents?” This suggested to me that we haven’t done a good enough job of telling people the good news about the Canadian Experience Class, which invites foreign students who have completed a two-year degree or diploma, and have done one year of work in Canada – which we facilitate through a work permit – to stay in Canada as permanent residents on a fast track basis. The same opportunity is available to mid-to-high-range Temporary Foreign Workers who have done two years of work in Canada.

That is a phenomenal program, because the people already have Canadian work experience, and diplomas and degrees that will be recognized by Canadian employers.  Typically, they already have a job lined up. They have perfected their English or French language skills. They are set for success. I hope a decade from now that the Canadian Experience Class will be our core economic immigration program, because I think there’s no better way to prepare people for success.

Those are some of the things we’ve done, but we all know – and this is the subject of your conference – that one of the most significant reasons for the economic underperformance of many newcomers to Canada in the past decades has been the barriers to licensure and recognition of credentials for foreign trained professionals.  I know you have here representatives of different licensing bodies. You all understand the complexity of the problem. But we have to constantly remind ourselves to look at this through the eyes of immigrants who arrive in this country.

They apply, and as far as they’re concerned, we assess them based on their education and their experience and now, based on the profession in which they work. We tell them explicitly that we need their skills in Canada. We need doctors and dentists and engineers. So we invite them to come here. They leave behind everything that’s familiar, typically better trained professionals leave behind the high end of the social economic strata of their countries of origin, often developing countries, and they arrive in Canada, as you know, all too often finding themselves overwhelmed and frustrated by the burdensome process to get their credentials recognized so they can go to work in their profession at their skill level.

This, as you know, has been a problem for decades. There has never been an easy solution, but I believe we are beginning to turn the corner. I believe that people can start to see light at the end of the tunnel in terms of opportunity for credential recognition for foreign trained professionals. We should not understate the frustration this has caused. We see it in the economic statistics, but I see it almost every day in terms of the human cost.

I can’t tell you how many newcomers I’ve met who, because they see me as a kind of representative of the immigration system that invited them, come up to me and break down emotionally as they tell me about the frustration they feel being stuck in survival jobs, underemployed or unemployed, depleting their family savings and not realizing their potential, going home to their families feeling like failures, feeling ashamed. On Saturday night, I was in Vancouver at a Persian Nowruz celebration and a beautiful woman and her husband came up to me. She just broke right down. She just started crying.

She said, “Minister, I came to Canada three years ago from Iran. I’m a radiologist.  I practiced for 15 years in Iran. My husband is an orthopaedic surgeon. He practised for 17 years in Iran. We’ve come to this country so that we could practise in this free and prosperous country in our medical professions. Three years later, we’ve depleted our savings.”

”We’re no further ahead,” she said. “I hate Iran, what the government is doing there, the violations of human rights.  The worst thing I can imagine is to go back to that country. But I’ve now concluded I’m going to have to just in order to make ends meet for my family, so we can keep my son here in Canada and he can go to university.”

This doctor, Souhaila, wrote to me saying her family “immigrated to Canada about three years ago: Three of us, a father, a mother and a teenage son. I’m specialized in the field of radiology. I’ve been a practising radiologist for more than 17 years and held various positions at hospitals in Iran prior to our arrival in BC. My husband is an orthopaedic surgeon and has been practising his specialty for around 15 years. Our son, Sam, is currently attending high school. He is bright, full of promise and very ambitious.  He wants to attend Harvard and find a cure for cancer. My husband and I believe in him and have come here to support him in any way we can. But since our arrival, we have made many attempts to enter the Canadian medical system, but to no avail. I have already passed all required medical exams and have applied to the Canadian residency matching service for two consecutive years, but so far have had no success.”

“Not finding an opening in the medical field, my husband and I have been taking medical courses at Simon Fraser University and UBC, with the hope of somehow integrating with the Canadian society and finding jobs. This experience has been similarly inconclusive. We have tried with all the passion and sincerity of new immigrants to break ground, but our options appear to become more limited every day.  Perhaps it’s the macro- or micro-economy at play, but at this point we’re faced with the prospect of going back to Iran to earn a living just to support Sam in his pursuit.  Needless to say, this separation is a sacrifice beyond any parent’s reasonable limits of understanding and tolerance.”

I quoted that at length, and I told you this lady’s story, because for me it symbolizes the fact that we have a moral obligation as Canadians – and all of us in government, and all of the professional licensing bodies – to move forward with deliberation and with haste, with urgency, to do whatever we can to open the opportunity for people like this to practise. We often say one of the reasons that foreign trained professionals don’t get their credentials, don’t get to practise, is limited language proficiency.

You heard me quote from this woman’s word-perfect idiomatically correct English.  She’s got all the cultural cues down. She’s done the supplementary training. She’s applied to all the programs. And she’s going back to Iran. We’re failing people like this too often. We need to do more. As you know, this challenge of credential recognition – not to pass the buck, but to state a fact – is largely a provincial responsibility.  Of course, some 40-plus regulated professions and their professional agencies are creatures of the provinces, which we recognize.

And we’ve tried to work within that context, first of all, through our foreign credential recognition program at Human Resources and Social Development, which is provided tens of millions of dollars in grants and project support, together with the Health Partners Network at Health Canada, to prime the pump with the professional agencies, to help with supplementary training for foreign trained professionals and to streamline the process. Secondly, in 2006, our government created the Foreign Credential Referral Office, of which Corinne is the Director General, with a $38-million-dollar budget, I believe originally, which has gone overseas to help prepare economic immigrants before they get to Canada.

Now we have offices in several countries, and satellite offices in many more, meaning that some 80 per cent of the selected economic immigrants to Canada can register and receive free two-day seminars and personalized counselling on how to find a job in Canada, and begin the process of credential recognition before they get here, to provide them with that head start. I’m pleased to say we see good progress for the graduates of that program.

Similarly the FCRO in my Ministry has been doing good work with the sector councils.  We published our guide for businesses on how to evaluate the credentials of immigrants and how to integrate them into their workforce, and many other good projects like the one in Edmonton where we are supporting a settlement organization taking foreign trained physicians and at least upgrading their skills so they can work as paramedics in the medical field and keep some of their skills sharp.

Those are all good programs, and we appreciate the partnership with many of your organizations in their delivery, but we need to go further, as I have said. That is why, as part of the transformative changes that we will be making in our immigration program in the course of the next year, we will begin to move the pre-recognition of foreign credentials overseas. Before I get to that, of course, I want to also thank you all for the important work that many of your agencies have done with us in the Pan-Canadian Framework for Foreign Credential Qualifications and Recognition.

The Framework is an important project that the Prime Minister and Premiers launched in 2009 at the First Ministers meeting. It has been fuelled by a $50-million-dollar Economic Action Plan investment to bring to the table a select number of professional licensing agencies to hammer out a streamlined process for credential recognition from coast to coast.  I’m pleased to say that we are making real progress with that. In fact, as you know, we just released this report on the progress we’ve made through the FCRO, including through the Framework. The objective, of course, in the Framework is as much as possible to give applicants for licensure an answer within a year of their application.

Finally, we have launched recently the pilot programs that were funded in last year’s budget to provide for micro-credit loans for skills upgrading, and to help newcomers pay for the costs of exams and licensing fees. It’s so important because often newcomers spend all their savings when they arrive in Canada. It’s very difficult for them to obtain credit from financial institutions, and they are often trapped in basic jobs just to take care of their families.

They don’t have the financial capacity to pay fees for additional courses, diplomas, exams, or to obtain their licence. So, it was important for us to launch the pilot projects with the $18-million-dollar allocation from the last federal budget.

As you’re all aware, the research shows that skilled immigrants who start the credential recognition process as early as possible are more likely to succeed.  With that in mind, the Government is proposing a new requirement for applicants to the Federal Skilled Worker Program to have their overseas educational credentials assessed and verified by third-party organizations that will be designated by my department for that purpose.

This is part of broader changes we are proposing with the intention of improving the Federal Skilled Worker Program and bringing it more in line with the needs of our modern economy.  The overall goal here is to better select and better support potential immigrants before they come to Canada, so they can hit the ground running once they arrive by integrating quickly into our labour market.  Within a couple of months, we intend to put out a call for submissions from potential third-party credential assessment organizations, and we hope to have them designated by the end of the year.

These organizations would be designated based on strict criteria, including their verification and assessment expertise, availability, and timeliness, among others.  Once this process is in place, we think this will result in a significant improvement in the points grid system we use to assess applicants to the Federal Skilled Worker Program.

Because points would be awarded according to how well an applicant’s foreign education compares to standards in Canada, we will be able to more effectively screen out applications without the necessary educational credentials, and those with formal educational credentials that have no equivalency to a Canadian degree, diploma or certificate.  We will also be able to provide better assurance to our officials that the applicant’s educational credentials are bona fide.  I know that I need to stress here that the process I’m describing is separate from the more in-depth assessments that regulatory bodies will subsequently use to license professionals coming from other countries.

We understand the importance of this licensing and we recognize that although the pre-arrival Educational Credential Assessments will help us to better ensure the success of the skilled immigrants we pick to come to Canada, they will not guarantee automatic employment or licensing in any particular occupation.  We all recognize that. We cannot guarantee people that they will be licensed, but what we should guarantee them is a fair shot at licensure, and to ensure that they’re as prepared as possible for that when they get here.

In addition to the more recent initiatives that I have just highlighted, we will continue with all of the other programs including with the FCRO, the pre-arrival orientation, and the micro-credit loans.  I really think this new policy development of doing a pre-screen on the relevance of immigrants’ education and professional qualifications before they get to Canada will save a lot of people a lot of frustration.

Let’s face it. Canadians don’t want us to lower the standard for licensure to our regulated professions. They don’t want us to have people who really don’t know how to build bridges at Canadian standards building our bridges. They don’t want people who don’t meet our standards to be surgeons performing surgery in Canada. They want professional bodies to maintain standards, but to give people a fair shot. It seems to me we all have a practical imperative to do just that. This new pre-assessment is really based in part on our observation about the Australian model, which has worked quite well. They have the advantage of having professions regulated at the Commonwealth or federal level. We have the added challenge of the provincial responsibilities for education and professional regulation.

We believe that by working together, particularly through the national bodies that represent and bring together the professional licensing groups, we can find practical ways to give people that green light before they get to Canada, if we believe they’re going to have a better-than-even chance of licensure and working in our economy.

I want to thank you very much for your hard work on this, for your partnership. But as I say, we all must recommit ourselves to doing more, to doing it faster, to renewing Canada’s identity around the world as a land of opportunity for those who seek to come here to work hard and to raise a family. Thank you very much.