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

Friends, I was here, I think, last in September, and some of you may have been here to hear me talk about some of the challenges we know that we’re facing in our labour markets and how to better connect our immigration program. That’s really what I want to get into today at a greater level of detail, but first of all, you know that my colleague Jim Flaherty just tabled our Economic Action Plan for 2012 in our budget two weeks ago and it points the way forward towards continued Canadian leadership in job creation and economic growth on the world stage.

As you know, we had the shortest and shallowest recession of any of the major developed countries in the world, since which time, especially with the incredible jobs report we saw for last month. We have seen the creation of nearly 700,000 net new jobs since the end of the global economic downturn, 80 % of which are full-time jobs. And we can now see the numbers are starting to demonstrate what many employers here in Western Canada have been feeling for the past 18 months, which is a tighter and tighter labour market with labour shortages emerging as one of the key challenges of the Canadian economy in the mid to long-term.

But the budget, I think, was a reflection of our government’s strong but prudent approach to economic management focused on job creation. It set out a very clear and credible pathway to balancing the federal budget within the next three fiscal years, and if things continue to go reasonably well, I think we’ll probably see that we’re back in the black in two fiscal years. We will be the first G8 country to be running a surplus in the post-recession environment. And that is a signal of the strength of Canada’s economy as well as some of the important but tough fiscal decisions that we took.

You know, some people out here have said, Why didn’t you cut more spending and more quickly? Well, I’ll tell you that every dollar that you find in savings is going to find some people who are opposed to it, and we see that now. And we just hope that common sense Canadians understand that when we’re operating a $280-billion budget, that we can manage prudently to find savings in the range of $5 to $6 billion, which is what we’re doing and we’ll be doing that in a way that does not affect front-line services for Canadians, not by slashing health transfers to the provinces, but in fact by increasing them. Rather, these are savings largely in the administrative areas of the operations of government, and these are difficult decisions, but they’re necessary ones to pave the way for the future, and we continue in the Economic Action Plan, our path towards a lower tax Canadian economy.

In fact already, as a result of some $200 billion in tax reductions over the course of the past several years, we have, of the past six years, we now have the lowest tax to GDP ratio in Canada since 1964. This budget continues with our tax relief for employers, it extends the hiring credit for small businesses and continues in the direction of more tax relief. And the light really at the end of the tunnel for this period of modest fiscal restraint is that when we do get to the balanced budget in three or four years time, we’ll be able to deliver on our platform commitments for even deeper and more broadly based tax relief such as the income splitting for working families that will save many families thousands of dollars a year in their taxes.

So this is all good news. But as you know, the budget also focused on many areas of important long term structural reform, such as ensuring the future of our public income support programs for seniors, particularly the Old Age Security program. As our workforce shrinks and the number of retirees and beneficiaries grow, we know that, like every other country, we need to make sure that programs like OAS are on a sustainable path, and that’s what we’re doing in a prudent and really quite gradual way in this budget. But we’re also looking at some of the major structural changes that need to be made to open opportunity for huge growth in the Canadian economy.

You know, ours is a government that is not ashamed of the fact that Canada, in its history and in its future, is a commodity-exporting nation. You know, sometimes it’s out of fashion. People deride the myth of Canada’s economy as one of the hewers of wood and drawers of water, but the reality is that we are witnessing a new boom in our commodities industries. And this is something that we should facilitate, not fight against.

Yes, it’s important for us, of course, constantly to be innovating, which is why in this budget we are restructuring our research and development programs to get more commercialized bang for the buck for the public investments in R&D. It’s why we’ve invested in research infrastructure at our post-secondary universities. But we can’t ignore this huge multi-hundred billion dollar investment boom that we are seeing in our resource industries. It’s not just about the oil sands. It’s not just about oil and gas. It’s about the Ring of Fire, of new mining developments in Northern Ontario. It’s about the Plan Nord au nord du Québec. It’s about the enormous developments going on in Newfoundland in our far North. It’s in every region of the country.

And if we are to realize the potential of those investments to create wealth and raise our standard of living, then we must take action to streamline the regulatory process for major investments, and particularly for our capacity to export our commodities. That’s why one of the key elements of the budget was to announce to action plan to streamline environmental regulations, not to diminish or downgrade environmental regulation, but to eliminate unnecessary redundancy, overlap and duplication and to ensure that environmental assessments and approvals for major projects are done, yes, in a thorough, but also a timely fashion. We cannot, we must not replay the movie that we all saw with the MacKenzie Valley pipeline, taking over 10 years, a massive uncertainty, driving away capital and investment as we worked our way through an inscrutable and endless regulatory and consultative process.

Yes, we must consult, yes, we must do environmental assessments, yes, we must protect public health and the safety of our environment. But we can do all of that with one regulator rather than two. We can do all that with reasonable timelines and that’s what the budget points us toward. You’ll see in our Budget Implementation Act, which will be tabled in Parliament in a couple of weeks, the details of that plan, which will bring us to a much more predictable streamline process for approving major projects, and that will be good news for the entire Canadian economy.

And thirdly, our budget talked about the importance of structural reform in our immigration programs. Now, let me talk to you here about a little bit of a paradox. The paradox is this: we have been welcoming to Canada historic high levels of immigrants, really unprecedented, since our government took office, welcoming over a quarter of a million new permanent residents per year, and while adding the equivalent of 0.8% of our population through immigration per year. So this is unprecedented, the highest relative levels of immigration in the developed world, the highest sustained levels of immigration in Canadian history.

And yet, we see an ongoing problem, which has really been consistent for three decades now, of unacceptably high levels of unemployment and underemployment amongst far too many of those newcomers. So the rate of unemployment amongst new Canadians is twice as high as it is amongst native-born Canadians. The unemployment rate amongst foreign-born Canadians with university degrees is three times higher than for native-born Canadians with university degrees. And incomes for immigrants have been, in both absolute and relative standards, on a three-decade decline.

This isn’t a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of fact. The data demonstrates it. Every think tank that has studied this, from whatever position on the political spectrum they come, has concluded that actually and unfortunately, the net fiscal balance of immigration to Canada over the past three decades means that governments have been providing more in benefits to newcomers than deriving in taxes. And this is not to criticize our tradition of generosity, but it’s to say that we have to stop. We have to stop this pattern of welcoming highly-educated people to this country too often to be stuck in the trap of survival jobs, depleting their savings while their skills atrophy.

And here’s the paradox. In an economy where there are huge and growing labour shortages, how does this make any sense, that every business in this room knows about these huge and growing labour shortages, and yet, today there are people arriving at Vancouver Airport and at the Toronto Airport, who are getting off that plane right now, walking up to the CBSA desk to have their immigration forms stamped as permanent residents in Canada. They’re walking up to that desk with the sense of foreboding, a sense of hope and optimism, but uncertainty about what they’re going to do. And too many of them are going to be medical doctors or engineers or highly-trained professionals from their countries of origin. They’re going to leave that airport and they’ll start their job search and they’ll find out that, first of all, they don’t have Canadian experience so good luck getting a Canadian job, and secondly, if they want to work in a licensed profession, they’re going to have to go through an often endless process with no clear result at the end of it.

And so many of them will end up like the people that you and I both, all know. The folks working the graveyard shift in security in the office buildings downtown here. The people working at the convenience stores and driving cabs. Too many of them stuck in survival jobs, wasting their potential, representing an opportunity cost for Canada, and often, absorbing incalculable difficulties for their families who feel a sense of shame. I’ll give you the example: a couple of weeks ago, I was at a Persian event in Vancouver and a medical doctor who was a radiologist came up to me, marvellous, articulate woman who said she had been in Canada for three years. Her husband was a pediatric surgeon in Iran, she was a radiologist.

For three years, they’ve been trying to get their licenses to practice. They’re no further ahead than when they got here. They’ve depleted their savings and she said to me, Now it looks like I’m going to have to go back to Iran. I hate, she said, I hate Iran with this government that we have now, but I have no choice if I want to be able to keep my son here in Canada, put him through college so he can realize his dream as inventing the cure for cancer. Friends, we have this amazingly positive myth of immigration to Canada, and it’s one that we embrace. But too often, the real story is one of disappointment like that.

And at the same time, we face these huge labour shortages that represent a real threat to the prospects of growth in our economy. Now, that’s why the Prime Minister signalled at his speech at the World Economic Forum in January that we would embarking on transformational change in our immigration programs. I’ve talked to you here before about a number of the things we’ve done already to set the stage, through our massive expansion of the Provincial Nominee Program, for example, in fact, a 17-fold increase in that program, which has resulted in a tripling of immigration to the Prairie provinces. And that’s good news.

We’ve done a major study on that program recently, demonstrating that people coming through the Provincial Nominee Program are doing very well economically because typically, and at its best, that program operates on a basis of a pre-arranged job, and it’s giving access to skilled tradespeople who, for example, might not otherwise be able to come through our more rigid federal programs. So that program is a success. We’ve expanded it 17-fold since we came to office. We can’t continue to grow it at that velocity, and we are working with the provinces to improve it, to tighten it up, to put in place a mandatory language benchmark, because language proficiency is the number one criteria for economic success, according to all the research, and to make sure that provinces are using that program judiciously, to nominate folks who can’t come in through our federal programs.

Second thing we’ve done was the introduction of the Canadian Experience Class. You’ve heard me talk about this before, perhaps, about the madness of how in the past, we were telling these brilliant young foreign students who had graduated from our colleges and universities that if they wanted to stay in Canada and work, they should instead leave, get in the back of an eight-year long queue, and reapply for readmission. We were losing people who already perfected their English or French language skills, who had degrees that would be recognized by Canadian employers, and often had jobs lined up.

Well, no longer are we telling them to leave. Now we’re inviting them to stay through the Canadian Experience Class. We’re receiving thousands of bright young foreign students who have been educated at Canadian universities, or higher-skilled temporary foreign workers, and we expect that program to become, in the long run, the core immigration program in Canada, a program where people are pre-integrated when they are admitted to stay here permanently.

Thirdly, we’ve made other changes. One of the major changes has been to try to get a handle on these huge backlogs that ended up clogging up our immigration system. Do you know when we came to office, it was Monte I guess who was the first Minister, he opened the filing cabinet at CIC and it just kept opening and opening and opening. We found 850,000 applications in the queue, taking eight years on average to process, when other countries with whom we are competing for human capital for the world’s best and brightest, countries like Australia and New Zealand, were doing their applications and bringing people in a period of six months.

This meant, as I’ve said, that if you were the top graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology at Hyderabad, you are South Asia’s future Bill Gates potentially, you could get into Australia and New Zealand in six months and we, for Canada, we told you to take a number and we’d get back to you in eight years. Guess what that meant? That many of the best and brightest were choosing not to come here.

Now, that characterizes the old system, a system that was rigid, slow-moving and passive, which did very little to match the particular skills of immigrants with the actual labour shortages in the Canadian economy. The transformation change upon which we have embarked this year will take us from that slow, rigid and passive system to a system that is fast, flexible and proactive. We are moving increasingly from a supply-driven system to a demand-driven immigration system. What do I mean by this?

Well, first of all, I believe that employers know infinitely better than the government which individuals are able to work at their skill level upon arrival in Canada. I have to offer a caveat here. We are a successful country with respect to immigration. Many other countries look at us as a kind of a model. And our Skilled Worker Program has invited highly-skilled people, and many of them do very well, but we could do so much better, and that’s the point. And I believe that employers know better who has the skills that can be immediately translated into the Canadian labour force. What we want is a system where engineers coming to Canada work as engineers and not as cab drivers, where medical doctors, within a reasonable amount of time, can be treating patients rather than taking courses and depleting their savings.

That’s the system we want to get to. We want to get to a system where the huge need for skilled tradespeople in this province, for example, is fulfilled through our immigration program rather than finding many newcomers on the unemployment rolls. So how do we get to that fast and flexible system? Well, first of all, we have to deal decisively with the legacy backlogs that developed in immigration. You know, we’ve had some success in this, incrementally reducing it, but it’s still way too big. We have altogether a million people. We have 460,000 in our Skilled Worker Program, which is why we announced in our budget that we are returning most of those applications. We’re just going to start with a clean slate, and so we are retuning about 300,000 people’s applications so that within a year or so, we can have a just-in-time immigration system.

Our vision is that by 2014, if someone applies from abroad to immigrate to Canada, they will get a decision and they will be accepted or not that year, hopefully within a few months. And better yet, the whole idea of a just-in-time system, a working inventory as we call it, is that this will then empower employers to offer people jobs and we will be able to bring them in as permanent residents almost immediately, in a couple of months we hope, in the new system.

So here’s where we want to go, working with employers to do more recruitment overseas. You know, employers and businesses have to be part of the solution. They have to start looking at the global labour market and how proactively to select these folks, to do their due diligence. We will be doing our part. We’re going to be creating a mandatory process for pre-assessing the education of applicants for immigration. Right now, we assign the same amount of points to someone who graduated from Harvard or Cambridge as the dodgiest college in the world. In the future, we’re going to actually look at the quality of education and its relevance to the Canadian labour market.

So that means people that would be going into our new pool of qualified applicants for immigration will be at a Canadian standard. And that pool will be accessible to employers. Those applicants will have given us permission to share their applications, their resumes, their names with employers and with provinces, who can then, if there’s a company here that needs 100 geologists in the next five years, they would be able to go into the pool of qualified applicants, do a query for geologists, do their own assessment, offer them the jobs, and then we will bring them in in double time. That’s the new immigration system of the future.

And I have to say I’m really excited about it. Within a couple of years, we’ll also be in a situation where we’re doing a pre-assessment of professional qualifications for those who aspire to work in licensed professions, so we’re working with all of the physicians colleges, all of the law societies, all of the engineering colleges at the national level to create a process for a pre-assessment of licensed professionals credentials. Why? So that we can give those applicants an indication of whether they have a better-than-even chance of getting their license in Canada. Again, to stop the madness of the taxi-driving doctor and instead to welcome people into that pool of qualified applicants who we know are likely to succeed.

And finally, I’m happy to announce today that we will be creating, within our federal economic immigration system, a specific stream for skilled tradespeople. Now, in the past, it was virtually impossible for skilled tradespeople to get in through our rigid economic immigration programs at the federal level. Typically, they needed, you know, post-secondary degrees and high levels of official language proficiency. And this meant that the Polish welder, the American – well, probably that’s not a good example – but people overseas who might not have been at a Canadian standard, even American tradespeople, couldn’t get in through the Skilled Worker Program. They didn’t have a post-secondary degree.

Well, now, we will be creating a special program which is based on a job offer from a Canadian employer who has certified that that individual’s practical experience is equivalent to what is required at Canadian Red Seal trades and other forms of certification in Canada. So the employer will be doing the due diligence, identifying whether that person has the practical skills and experience, and inviting them in, and we’ll give them a yes or no answer.

So that should be in place by the end of this year as part of our overall reforms of the Skilled Worker Program that will also be placing greater emphasis on younger workers, those with pre-arranged jobs in Canada, because they do massively better, and people with, as I say, more relevant education.

One last point about this. Our data tells us that people do better with higher levels of English or French language proficiency. And that’s why we will probably be raising the points in our Skilled Worker Program for those folks who want to come and work in the professions. But you don’t need university level English in order to weld pipe. You need a workable level of English. And so, we’re going to have a more flexible and intelligent assessment. So, for example, skilled tradespeople won’t be required to have high levels of language proficiency, but sort of mid levels of proficiency, enough to get by in their profession.

I’ve said finally, and this is my last finally, because I know this will come up in the question period. A lot of you are also interested in the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. I’ve been here to speak about that before. My colleague Diane Finley will be making an important announcement in the weeks to come about streamlining that program. We’ve already intimated that in the budget. And we hear a lot of people in industry in Alberta wanting particularly streamlined access for U.S. workers. Whether they’re from the U.S. or anywhere else, this will be in place in the near future. A one-step system for those occupations that are most in demand, and a much streamlined system for all other occupations.

The bottom line is whoever is the provincial government after April 23^rd, we hope and believe, will send us a letter asking us to exempt certain occupational categories from the requirement of getting the labour market opinion, and then we will give instructions to the CBSA to issue work permits for those folks who you invite in on arrival at the port of entry. This means a faster, more streamlined process to meet many of these acute labour shortages.

In closing, friends, I am profoundly excited about the opportunity that this transformational change represents because what we’re talking about will be powerful for the Canadian economy in putting to work the skills, the talents and the amazing work ethic of these newcomers from all around the world, but it also means that they’ll be able to realize their potential here. And not just struggle to get by with the hope of their children having a better life, but that they too will enjoy the prosperity that we dream of for all Canadians.

Thanks very much for your attention. I look forward to your questions.