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

It’s great to be here with my friend and colleague Rob Norris, my counterpart for the province of Saskatchewan who is doing a phenomenal job with Premier Brad Wall in leading the way forward for Saskatchewan’s growth, particularly being very forward-looking on the huge challenge that we are all facing of labour shortages in this province and across Canada. And that’s really the reason for my being here, the announcement that I’m going to make.

First of all, let me say that I’m a Saskatchewan boy, so it’s great to be back home. I’m one of the economic refugees to Alberta and I’d come back over the years and see a lot of “For Lease” and “For Sale” signs around Saskatoon. And things were sometimes looking not so good down in Regina and small towns were shrinking and people were leaving. And it is just so great, as someone who grew up in this province, to come back and see this place just humming with energy, with new people, with young people, with businesses whose biggest problem is finding people to work for them and not finding work to do. So this is almost an economic revolution this province is going through and it is so exciting to see. Congratulations to Minister Norris and his government for being a key part of that renewed growth. 

I think the new unemployment stats came out last week showing Saskatchewan has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and it is basically humming around full employment. And this reflects what is increasingly the largest economic challenge that we will be facing in Canada in the not-too-distant future. 

It’s true that we still have too many unemployed Canadians, but it’s also true that we have huge and growing labour shortages. This is a paradox that we need to solve and our government is working, through our Economic Action Plan, to improve training –  particularly for young and unemployed Aboriginal Canadians – to encourage those who are on employment insurance to find gainful work. We’ll be reforming the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to encourage folks who are unemployed in regions of traditionally high unemployment to take the jobs that are available. 

But we also see immigration as a key tool in addressing the large and growing labour shortages which are hard to understate and that is why we’ve been very proud of our record in better aligning immigration with the country’s labour market needs. In fact, since we came to office, we’ve maintained the highest relative levels of immigration in the developed world, adding 0.8 percent of our population per year. And we’ve also maintained the highest sustained levels of immigration in Canadian history, welcoming over a quarter of a million newcomers, maintaining our tradition of openness to the hard work and energy and spirit of newcomers. 

And, in particular, I think one of the great achievements of our immigration reforms in the past five years has been finally getting a good geographic distribution of newcomers across the country. It used to be that almost nine out of 10 newcomers settled in our three biggest cities, even if that’s where the jobs couldn’t be found. And that’s one of the reasons we ended up with very high unemployment and underemployment amongst immigrants.

But the good news is this, that since 2006 when we came to office, we set about massively expanding the Provincial Nominee Program and making some other changes. We have seen a huge increase in immigration to the West, the Prairies, in particular, and to Atlantic Canada. In fact, we’ve seen immigration to Atlantic Canada double, immigration to Manitoba triple, to Saskatchewan quadruple and to Alberta double over the past five years. And this is good news. We’ve gone from 2,000 permanent residents settling in Saskatchewan back in 2005 to 9,000 last year. And that is helping to fuel this province’s positive population growth.

That, in large measure, was achieved by expanding the admission of provincial nominees through the Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program, from 500 folks in 2005 to 8,700 last year. So that is a massive increase. And that’s a good news story. Nationally, we have gone from 5,000 admissions under the Provincial Nominee Program in 2005 to 45,000 planned for this year. So this is good news. 

We’ve also done a major study on the Provincial Nominee Program. We want to make sure that we’re doing the right things in our immigration reforms. And the study came back very positive. It indicated that we are seeing very positive economic results generally for the provincial nominees that are coming into Canada, because typically the program operates on the basis of a pre-arranged job. And where we really see this program working best is when employers like Morris Industries and others go abroad and proactively recruit talented workers who they know can work upon arrival at their skill level in Canada, realizing their potential and productively contributing to the Canadian economy.

That’s the example I use when I talk about immigration reform all across Canada, as opposed to the old and broken way of doing things in our rigid and slow-moving immigration system where we would just invite people in, regardless of the relevance of their education or experience or qualifications to the Canadian labour market.  We’d invite them in to sink or swim in our labour market and too many have had to struggle just to keep their head above water. Too many are stuck in survival jobs, underemployed and unemployed.

And so what we see with the Provincial Nominee immigrants that Morris Industries and hundreds of Saskatchewan entrepreneurs have invited in the province through the agency of the provincial government is, at its best, it is a program that aligns talented newcomers with employers who need their precise skill set so they can get to work upon arrival. You don’t end up with an immigrant who’s upset that their skills are not being used, or that they’re underemployed. They’re happily employed at their skill level, contributing to our economy and paying taxes too. And that’s good for all of us.

So we want to expand that model, which is why we have indicated in our Economic Action Plan for 2012, the federal budget tabled by Jim Flaherty two weeks ago, that we are embarking upon a process of transformational change in Canada’s immigration programs. We are going to move from the slow, rigid and passive system which has had deteriorating results for newcomers to a fast, flexible and proactive system that will get much better economic results for newcomers and for Canada.

I’m going to give you a little bit of background here on this, because I want to explain to people how important these reforms are. In order for us to get to a fast system, a just-in-time system, a system where employers can offer someone a job and then bring them here in a matter of months, we need to deal with the huge legacy problem of backlogs that we inherited — almost a million people sitting in a queue waiting for up to seven years for an answer on whether they can come to Canada.

And that’s why we’ve taken decisive action to return a large number of the old and stale applications we’ve had clogging up our system. This means that by 2014, in about 18 months, Canada will have on a national level a just-in-time immigration system. An applicant who applies in 2014 will get an answer on whether they come in that year.  And this means that basically our federal immigration programs will be complementing what the SINP and the other provincial nominee programs are doing across Canada — empowering employers, empowering businesses who know better than governments which folks can work at their skill level upon arrival in Canada. That’s what this is all about. It’s a proactive system that invites people in who can succeed.

We’ll be pursuing all of those federal reforms and I’m happy to take questions you have about that. We’ll be making announcements throughout the course of the year. Just yesterday, by the way, I announced in Calgary that one of the key reforms will be the creation of a new dedicated skilled trades stream in the federal immigration program.  This is an important development because, until now, in our federal immigration programs, unless you had a post-secondary degree and very high levels of official language proficiency, you basically couldn’t get in. Only three percent of the federal economic immigrants were skilled tradespeople. That doesn’t make a lot of sense in an economy where there are huge shortages of welders, boilermakers and heavy equipment operators.

We need those folks and we’re going to start bringing them in through our federal programs. We’re going to start telling companies like Morris Industries that you’ve got a choice. You can go through the Saskatchewan program or you can go through these federal programs as well. More flexibility, more responsiveness to the marketplace.  And that is very exciting.

But we also believe that we must ensure the continued success of the Provincial Nominee Program. A couple of the things that came out of our major analysis of the PN Program that we conducted and published late last year, is that it’s very important for us, we believe, to have a minimum language benchmark for the provincial nominees who are admitted to Canada as permanent residents. All of the research done in Canada on immigration indicates that the single most important factor in the success or failure of economic immigrants is their English language proficiency — in Quebec, French of course. And this just stands to reason. You know, people need to be able to get by in the society that they’re in. They need to understand the language and the technical language of the workplace. 

Until now we’ve pursued the Provincial Nominee Programs with an enormous amount of flexibility, which we think is a good thing. It’s been a kind of policy laboratory with the provinces, finding what works best for their regional economies. But we have now consulted with the provinces, including Saskatchewan, on moving forward towards establishing a minimum language benchmark for provincial nominees. This will come into effect as of July of this year. People who enter Canada as temporary foreign workers prior to July of this year will be exempted, but people who come in as TFWs after July of this year, in order to be nominated as permanent residents, will be required to demonstrate, through a third party language assessor, a Canada language benchmark level of 4, which is basically at the low end of the intermediate scale of language proficiency.

Let me be clear. We’re not suggesting that folks that come and work as mechanics at Morris Industries need to have university level proficiency in English. They don’t need to have PhD in English Literature, thankfully. What they do need to have is just enough English to get by. And we think that’s fair to them and fair to Canada. Because they’ll integrate faster and they’ll do better economically in the long run.

Now for employers who identify people abroad who may not already be at that language benchmark, they can invite them in as temporary foreign workers and of course we’ll facilitate their entry into the country and they can stay here, depending on their renewals, for up to four years. And that’s a good chunk of time where they can improve their language skills, so they can get up to that language benchmark and be nominated as permanent residents. But we just feel it’s really important to have some basic benchmarks right across the country because – this is not really so much a problem in Saskatchewan – but in a couple of the other provinces. We’ve seen in some Provincial Nominee Programs a large and growing number of people with no English language proficiency coming in as permanent residents and that concerns us.

You don’t want to end up creating a kind of underclass as seen in Europe, with immigrants who were admitted who didn’t have any official language proficiency and they ended up really locked out of social mobility and opportunity. We want to avoid that and that’s why we’re looking for this minimum language benchmark. And I o appreciate Minister Norris’ positive approach to this and Saskatchewan’s continued cooperation.

Secondly, we will be working with the provinces to ensure that the folks that they nominate into this important program are people that otherwise don’t have access through other immigration programs. We want them to maximize the provincial nominee program, so we’re encouraging provinces not to nominate people who could otherwise come in quickly through federal programs. 

One example would be our own federal family class that’s quite generous — the most generous family reunification program in the world. If people come into Saskatchewan and they want to sponsor family members, they can do that – not nominate, but sponsor family members through our federal family programs. And so we would encourage people to always look at how they can use the federal programs, rather than using up the scarce positions that are available for nomination, which are primarily for what we would call principal economic immigrants, people who are going to get to work contributing fully to the economy as much as possible.

So those are essentially the announcements I’m making today to help strengthen the value of the provincial immigration programs. This is a partnership.  And I just want to close by saying that when I go right across the country, the example I use for the immigration program of the future is what Saskatchewan is doing today. Which is proactively looking abroad to talented pools of workers, working between the government and businesses to invite those people in. What Rob and Premier Wall did in Ireland with employers last month is a phenomenal example of the kind of proactive recruitment of talented people from abroad that we need to see more of in this country.

So we’re very excited with the leadership being shown here in Saskatchewan. We’re very excited to have seen a quadrupling in the levels of immigration. We believe that, with the reforms we’re making federally and the strengthening of the Provincial Nominee Program, that we will continue to respond to this province’s growing economy and labour market needs. 

So thanks very much. Over to you, Rob, and I look forward to taking questions afterwards.