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

I’m really happy to be here in Calgary, my home town, to talk about an issue that’s obviously close to my heart and is absolutely central to the future of our country. I’m especially pleased to do so in the presence of my Deputy Minister, Neil Yeates, who – like me – is originally a Saskatchewan boy. And so he has brought to the Ottawa public service a Prairie common sense and work ethic, and that is much appreciated, I assure you. And Neil has been a tremendous partner for me as we’ve moved forward with transformational change to make our immigration system work for Canada and its economy.

I have to say that we have been working at what is, in federal government terms, absolutely light speed in the past couple of years to bring forward major reforms. And yet, Neil, this morning, Perrin Beatty said to me that we weren’t going far enough or fast enough. So you’ve got to stop slacking off. Please pick up the pace when you get back to Ottawa. But I really do have to say that I have a great partnership with the officials in my ministry, who are consummate professionals and are doing a phenomenal job. And we see ourselves as having a growing partnership and relationship with the private sector, with employers, with civil society.

When it comes to immigration – frankly when it comes to anything else – government doesn’t always know best and many of the reforms that we are making are designed to empower the private sector, to empower employers to help us in selecting the newcomers who are most likely to succeed. That’s why the theme of the conference – Competition for Global Talent – makes so much sense.

Now of course immigration is part of our identity. I certainly don’t agree with the National Post that I’m the best Immigration Minister. I think that Clifford Sifton is way out ahead of me as a visionary who saw the untamed West and realized that we needed people with a work ethic who were willing to come here and plow virgin soil and create a new society in this, the newest part of the new world. And thanks to that spirit of openness and enterprise, waves upon waves of newcomers arrived here – either as economic immigrants or as victims of persecution, refugees, as the losers of history like the potato famine Irish, my ancestors, the Clearance Scots, the United Empire Loyalists, and the slaves from the Underground Railroad.

Whether they were simply seeking a brighter future or fleeing persecution, waves of newcomers have made immigration a central part of our national identity, and have helped to create a very positive myth – in the best sense of the word – about the role of immigration in our country. And as a government, we have continued that uniquely positive approach to immigration and integration. In fact, since we took office six years ago, Prime Minister Harper’s government has maintained the highest sustained level of immigration, in absolute terms, in Canadian history, admitting over a quarter of a million of newcomers each year, and maintaining what is in per capita terms the highest level of immigration in the developed world. We’re sometimes closely tied with New Zealand, but well ahead of most other developed countries.

And I think that we Canadians take our current prosperity and economic stability perhaps a little bit for granted. We take a lot of things for granted. Hopefully, we’ll take some time on July 1^st to be grateful for all of these blessings we enjoy – one of them is that we have managed to maintain openness to newcomers at very high levels of immigration, while avoiding the kind of divisive debates and manifestations of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment that we see in much of the rest of the democratic west.

And I see it as one of my key responsibilities to maintain that broad and fairly deep public consensus, which is generally in favour of immigration. But in doing so, I have to acknowledge – and I think we need perhaps a more frank debate about immigration that does acknowledge – that notwithstanding the positive myth, notwithstanding that our country remains a land of opportunity for many newcomers, we cannot take for granted our success with respect to immigration and integration. Our success has been very much a qualified one. In so many respects, we have seen a waste of human capital and talent and potential and an opportunity cost for the Canadian economy by not always selecting those most likely to succeed, and seeing too many newcomers marginalised in our economy, rather than enjoying its prosperity.

And that’s why I’d like to talk now about the idea of applying this concept of social license to immigration policy. When I look at the public opinion polling, I see that only about 10 to 15 per cent of Canadians are actually in favour of higher immigration levels. I suspect that the consensus in this room would probably depart significantly from that because most employers understand the acuteness of the labour shortages that we’re facing, they understand the trends that you heard about earlier today, and so look at this from a kind of economic perspective primarily and say we need higher levels, we need more newcomers to deal with the aging of our society.

Now Bill and the C.D. Howe Institute have helped to point out that immigration realistically cannot be the solution to the aging of our society, that we would have to quadruple immigration levels and admit over a million permanent residents a year just to maintain the current age ratio of the population. While some people in the debate, like Andrew Coyne, would perhaps welcome this, very, very few Canadians would. Because Canadians – and I find, in my experience, particularly new Canadians – have a kind of a practical sense of the limits to our capacity to integrate newcomers. And it’s not surprising that we see new Canadians less likely to support higher immigration levels than native born Canadians.

So these are signals in the public mind that I am very attentive to, because I do not want to lose the social license to maintain a positive approach to immigration. Now, Thomas Friedman, the pro-immigration liberal columnist in the New York Times, expressed this concept of social license and immigration this way, when he said that an ideal immigration system has very high walls, but a very broad gate. That is to say, it’s a system that has rules that must be respected, a managed system, one characterized by the rule of law, but where there is still many realistic opportunities for people from around the world to come into the country. And if you don’t have the, the walls, if you don’t have the limits, if you don’t have integrity around the system, if the system becomes characterized by anyone coming into the country illegally, outside the rule of law, if the system begins to break down, then so too does the public support for it.

That is exactly what we’ve seen in the United States, in many respects, in the immigration debate now. I would argue that this is something we’ve seen, to some extent, in Australia. And then we can look at Western Europe, where frankly the significant failure of integration of newcomers has also regrettably led to a fairly widespread anti-immigrant backlash. We must be very intentional about avoiding the loss of social license to maintain our tradition of openness to newcomers. And that’s why for me it is so important that we demonstrate to Canadians two things.

First of all, demonstrate that our system is characterized by the rule of law, by the consistent application of fair rules, so people have confidence that if they follow the rules, there will be reasonable chance they’ll be able to join us in Canada and share in our prosperity. And the second key criterion for that social license is to demonstrate that immigration is working for Canada, that it actually serves our economic interests. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of data to suggest that the experience in the past three years has not entirely been a positive one in that sense.

So let me speak now about our transformational reforms to immigration policy. I’m going to talk first about something that’s not really on the conference agenda but is relevant, and that is reinforcing the integrity of our system. Then I’ll get into our economic immigration reforms. So we have taken a number of measures to reinforce public confidence in our system and its integrity. In fact, I can tell you that in a couple of hours, the Governor General will give royal assent to Bill C-31, Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act, which is the most recent and prominent example of our efforts in this regard.

This bill will further enhance our already adopted reforms to Canada’s asylum system, which has really become dysfunctional. It takes a couple of years for bona fide asylum claimants to get protection and it takes us several years to get around to removing even manifestly unfounded asylum claimants. This has created a pull factor for people to come, make false claims, stay for several years – often using social benefits – and become integrated, making it very difficult and awkward to remove such individuals. We need to focus our scarce resources on providing protection to those who need it, and we will continue to do so.

Our asylum reforms will mean that people who have a well-founded fear of persecution will get protection in Canada, without any exceptions. They will ensure that every asylum claimant from every country, regardless of the means of their arrival, will have access to our very fair legal system, which in some respects is even becoming fairer with the creation of an appeal division for failed asylum claimants. But they will also say to, for example, folks coming from democratic countries that generally respect human rights, from which we get very few bona fide asylum claims, that we will deal with your claim quickly and you won’t get all sorts of redundant administrative appeals. That’s a very important message to send.

Secondly, the bill that’s becoming law today will combat human smuggling. We’ve seen the problem in Australia, where it has massively undermined public support for refugee protection and, in some respects, immigration. We saw the same thing with the arrival of boats off our West Coast, when the public support for legal immigration went down appreciably following those events. Again, it goes back to that question of social license. And so we are sending signals in the bill that becomes law today that Canada will not be taken for granted by these criminal syndicates who put people’s lives at risk and treat them like cargo. We will change the business structure, the pricing logic of the human smuggling syndicates, with the bill that becomes law today.

And finally, we will be creating legal authority for a system of biometric visas that we’re replicating from Australia and the United States. This will, within a year or so, allow us to begin collecting fingerprints and digital photos from foreign nationals who want to visit Canada, initially from high risk countries so that we can identify whether they constitute a security risk – whether they’ve been deported or not and they’re seeking to come back in under a fake identity, which happens all too often. And this is an absolutely key part of our Beyond the Borders Action Plan with the US administration to radically improve immigration security screening.

I think it’s in our country’s interest – this and the other investments we’re making in border security. It’s in our national security interest. It’s also in our economic interest as we demonstrate to Washington, and policy makers in the United States, that we are serious about their anxiety on continental security. The biometric visa program, for which we get legal authority this afternoon, is a key part of that.

I’ve also just last week introduced Bill C-43, the Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act. I know some people think, “What? Was this really an important issue?” Well, I’ll tell you, if you’re the family member of someone who’s been victimized by a convicted serous foreign criminal who was allowed to stay for several years in Canada abusing a redundant appeal process, you would think it was pretty serious. If you were the family of Todd Baylis, the Toronto Police constable who was murdered by a convicted foreign criminal while he was using appeals on his deportation order, you’d think it was pretty serious.

And so again, this is an investment in reinforcing public support for the integrity of our system, because we’ll be curtailing various appeals on deportations for convicted serious foreign criminals. As I say, even they get their day in court, but they shouldn’t get endless years in court. They should get due process and not to be able to abuse our process.

We’ve also taken significant efforts to combat immigration fraud. Now those of you who have a familiarity with my ministry, and the immigration system on an operational side, will likely know that there’s endless pressure to get into the country. And that pressure has a real commercial value. And it’s served by a huge international industry of often underhanded immigration agents and fake immigration consultants, who will very often guarantee to foreign nationals that they can get them a visa, a permanent residency or visitor visa, whatever, to get into Canada. And they use all sorts of tricks – every trick in the book – to try to essentially violate our immigration laws.

And this again has created a growing lack of confidence in immigrant communities about the integrity of our system, because virtually every newcomer knows someone who got taken by one of these crooked agents overseas or here in Canada. That’s why we brought in a new law with stricter penalties for operating as a so-called ghost consultant – that is to say an unregistered consultant. We’ve created a new and far more credible and enforcement-minded regulatory body for that industry that works and we are doing much better information-sharing between law-enforcement agencies. I’ve gone abroad, raised this issue with everyone from the Prime Minister of India to the President of the Philippines, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the Public Security Minister in China. We’re working with those foreign governments to have better enforcement and protection for customers: Their citizens and our prospective immigration clients.

And another area where we’re reinforcing integrity is with respect to marriage fraud. It won’t surprise you to know that one of the favourite ways to sneak into Canada, without going the lawful way, is to find a Canadian to sponsor you as a spouse. Sometimes this is done unwittingly by the Canadian. They’re the sucker and they end up getting hurt emotionally. Sometimes it’s a commercial transaction. We have brought in new rules to allow us to not grant immediate permanent residency to folks who come in as a sponsored spouse, so we can see whether it’s a bona fide relationship or not. Some of these things may seem a little bit harsh, but quite frankly, we think that’s the norm. The policies we’re adopting are really the norm in places like Australia, the U.K., the U.S. and New Zealand, with whom we share best practices very closely.

So that gives you an overview of some of the ways in which we are seeking to reinforce the integrity of our system. And now, as I said, the other part of maintaining social license for immigration is I think demonstrating that the system works for Canada and for our economy. Now, there’s a paradox here. We have been maintaining historic high levels of immigration and yet we have an economy with acute labour shortages. And many newcomers are unemployed or underemployed, stuck in survival jobs, wasting their potential.

And the statistics are clear. The general rate of unemployment for new immigrants is nearly twice as high as the rate of unemployment in the general labour market. The rate of unemployment for new Canadians with university degrees is four to five times higher than it is for people born in Canada with university degrees. The average income earned by immigrants to Canada is now 60 per cent the average family revenue in Canada. It used to be closer to 90 per cent, about three decades ago. There has been a significant and steady decline in economic outcomes for newcomers, paradoxically, in an economy with acute labour shortages. It just doesn’t make sense.

And we can see that it’s also a fiscal reality. I mean, Patrick Grady and others have done research on this. Some of it’s a bit controversial but there is, I think, a fairly wide consensus amongst most scholars in this area that there are net fiscal transfers to immigrants in the range of billions – if not tens of billions – of dollars a year. That is to say, because of the lower incomes and lower taxes paid, if one subtracts social benefits received by newcomers, actually first generation immigrants do not, from an economic perspective, constitute a net fiscal advantage for Canadian governments. Now it’s important to add that we shouldn’t just look at these things with a green eyeshade on. We shouldn’t merely look and calculate the benefits of immigration based on fiscal transfers. We also have to look at the intangible benefits that immigrants bring, and the remarkable success of their children, for example.

And yet, at the same time, I’m acutely aware in my job of the human cost of this. I have just met too many highly trained foreign professionals who left behind lives where they were at the peak of the socio-economic spectrum of their countries of origin, to come to Canada to face chronic underemployment, to feel like our system cheated them. And that doesn’t accord with our identity as a country of equality of opportunity. Some of you heard, perhaps in previous speeches I’ve given, some of my anecdotes. But one that sticks with me: About three months ago in Vancouver, I met an obstetrician from Iran who had been in Canada for three years.

Obviously, she spoke word-perfect English, obviously a phenomenally well-educated woman who spent three years here essentially unemployed. And her husband is a paediatric surgeon. She said to me, “You know, we’ve depleted our savings, there doesn’t appear to be any progress for us to get our licenses to practice anywhere in the medical field. We now have decided we’re probably going to have to go back to Iran, as much as we can’t stand that place under the current government, just so we can generate an income to put our son through UBC, so he can become the doctor that cures cancer and realize his dream.”

And I’ve met too many women who have broken down in tears in front of me, like the Syrian obstetrician I met in Edmonton who had been cleaning hotel rooms for five years. We don’t really quantify how many of these people end up leaving, but far too many of them do. And for them, immigration to Canada comes with great promise and hope. And the hope often turns quickly into depression and despair. I don’t want to be too dark about this, because obviously there are the many brilliant success stories. And some of this is just a kind of randomness of the market, perhaps. For, you know, I was talking this morning about Hassan Khosrowshahi, who came to Canada as a refugee from Iran, with nothing except work ethic, and he created Future Shop and sold it for $3-billion dollars. Or Nadir Mohamed, who came as a refugee from racism in East Africa, who’s now the CEO of Rogers.

We note those success stories. Sadly they are, in my view, too much the exception and not enough the rule. And that is why we have an obligation to ourselves, and to those future newcomers, to ensure that equality of opportunity goes from being just a slogan to a lived reality for the newcomers we welcome. So why is it that our system has seen declining economic results for newcomers? A lot of reasons. The academics here have published papers on it, and I’m not going to get into a detailed dissection of it, except to say that in many respects, our system became slow, rigid and passive and created rigidities that made it difficult for us to attract many of the world’s best and brightest and to actually compete for global talent.

What do I mean by that slowness? Well, actually I’ll get to my favourite issue – backlogs – in just a second. Let me say, though, that in terms of the important transformational changes that we’ve already made as a government, one of them has been a much better geographic distribution of newcomers across the country. As you know, we used to be in a situation where virtually nine out of every 10 newcomers went to the three biggest metropolitan areas, even if that’s not where the best job opportunities were.

Now thanks to our huge expansion of the Provincial Nominee Programs, where we’ve gone from about 4,000 admissions six years ago to upwards of 40,000 admissions this year, we have seen a much better geographic distribution of newcomers. In fact, you can see on the chart here, just in Alberta, the huge growth going from 400 to about 13,000 PN admissions. This has resulted in a tripling of immigration levels on the Canadian Prairies, a doubling in Atlantic Canada. More folks are going to the BC Interior vis-à-vis Vancouver, and typically doing very well. This is because, at its best, this program is based on pre-arranged job offers, often for skilled tradespeople who have not in the past been able to come in through our federal economic programs.

And typically, they’re doing quite well, at least in their initial years. They don’t have the same kind of dynamic growth prospects in their incomes as federal skilled workers do, but they’re doing well upon arrival. And the more important thing is, finally, we’re seeing a good distribution of immigrants across the country.

The second important thing we’ve done was the creation of the Canadian Experience Class. This is especially relevant to the universities and post-secondary institutions. We used to say for a long while to foreign students who got a Canadian degree or diploma, “Good for you, you speak English or French well, you got a degree that will be recognized by a Canadian employer, you maybe have some work experience, you’ve adopted the soft social skills, you’re set for success. Now please leave Canada, and if you want to immigrate, we’ll get back to you eight years from now.” That’s the tyranny of these backlogs.

And that represents the rigidity of the old system. So what we did through the Canadian Experience Class is to say, “Foreign students, we want you. You have remarkable human capital. Again, you’ve got the official languages skills that we know are the most important factor for success, and degrees that will be recognized by Canadian employers. If you just get one year of work in Canada after two years of a degree or diploma in your studies, we’ll grant you permanent residency and try to do so as quickly as we can.” We also created a special stream for PhD students, because it’s a longer program of studying. So after two years of doing the PhD studies, they too can get permanent residency. This makes so much more sense.

We’ve also made that permanent residency available to higher skilled temporary foreign workers, integrated in the workplace. The employer wants them, they want to stay. Why would we ask them to leave? And so now, through the Canadian Experience Class, as of January 1st next year, high-skilled temporary foreign workers will be able to stay as permanent residents after one year of work in Canada. So those are a couple of the things that we’ve done to begin addressing the need for transformational change.

But one of the really serious problems that we developed in this system over the course of a couple of decades was huge ungovernable backlogs. I don’t think there was much awareness of this, outside of immigration-policy-wonk circles, until a couple of years ago. I was in Parliament for 10 or 12 years before, and it wasn’t until I became Minister of Immigration that I started to figure this problem out. When the current government came to office in 2006, 840,000 people were waiting in our backlog for seven or eight years in our various programs because – bear with me here – we Canadians are just so polite, we don’t like to say no to anyone. And so we said to everyone in the world, “You want to apply? Fantastic! Fill out an application, send us your fee. We will impose upon ourselves the legal obligation to process that application to finalization, even though there are billions of people who want to migrate here, and there are obviously finite numbers of people that we can accept.”

And this is how we ended up with a massive backlog. Every year, we were overselling the immigration plane to Canada by about two seats for every seat that was available. We were taking in 400,000 applications for about, let’s say, 230,000 spots in the last decade. And those people were getting pretty ornery waiting in the departures lounge, as the crowd got bigger and bigger. And because we were dealing with an old paper-based system, you know how that is when they’ve cancelled your flight and you just wish they’d come on and tell you what the alternative is? Well we weren’t getting on the PA system. We were just leaving them there to stew.

So many of the best and brightest would just pull out. Why would they wait for eight years to come here if they could get to Australia or New Zealand, with similar economic prospects, in a few months? You know, I’m asked, now that we’re dealing decisively to eliminate the backlog, “Is this going to hurt Canada’s reputation overseas?” I say, “No.” For those who have the highest levels of human capital, it will help our reputation. It will say to them, “You can come in here in a few months.” What’s been hurting our reputation is a dysfunctional system that forces people to wait for years.

So as a result of changes we’ve made – legal tools we gave the government in 2008 – we’ve seen on the federal skilled worker backlog a steep reduction. But we were still stuck on sort of four- to-five-year wait times, and not nearly close to the sort of nimble and fast responsive system that we need. And that is why the government has proposed in Bill C-38 – the Jobs, Growth and Long Term Prosperity Act, which will, I gather get royal assent later today, as well – that we will be able to return about three quarters of the applications in that backlog. Practically, what does that mean?

Practically, it means that by the end of next year, we will have a fast and nimble, labour-market-responsive federal immigration program. And it’s about time. It means that we will be able to process and admit qualified applicants, especially those with job offers, in a matter of months, and no longer take several years.

Now, that speed is key in the competition for global talent. But another innovation that we will be implementing in the next year is really a replication of an excellent system that New Zealand designed about five years ago, and Australia’s about to pull the trigger on next week – in fact July 1st: An Expression of Interest Pool, which means that pre-qualified applicants from around the world will submit online applications. They say they want to come to Canada. Great. Fill out this form, tell us about your language level, tell us about your education, tell us about your work experience and your family structure, and go into a pool. And they will have given us their consent to share their applications with employers and with provinces, which means, you know, for example, the Royal Bank in this room.

Oh, by the way, our 10,000th Canadian Experience Class recipient was a girl from Mongolia who graduated from Carleton with an MBA and was hired by the Royal Bank right away and became a permanent resident under our Canadian Experience Class. I’m always so excited when I see these things are actually working. It’s not just theory, it’s reality.

And so the Expression of Interest Pool will mean you go into this pool of pre-qualified applicants. And employers and provinces will be able to go into that pool. The Royal Bank says we need somebody with these particular skills in economic analysis. We can’t find that person in the Canadian domestic labour market. They’ll be able to do a search in that pool of pre-qualified applicants, pull out the relevant applicants, do their due diligence, whatever it is – interview them on Skype or have an overseas recruitment agent do some due diligence. If they like what they see and are willing to invest in that person, they can offer them the job. We will then move them to the front of the queue and admit them to Canada within, hopefully, three months.

That’s the new system of the future. And the Expression of Interest Pool will also have a pathway into it for skilled tradespeople. You know, this is a critical issue in Alberta, with the growing deficit of skilled tradespeople. In the past 20 or 30 years, you couldn’t get into Canada effectively as a tradesperson through the federal programs. It wasn’t until we opened up that avenue through the Provincial Nominee Programs. So now, there will be a dedicated avenue for skilled tradespeople, and we’re going to try to leave it largely up to employers to assess whether they have the appropriate skill levels, because of the complexities with the regulation of the assessment and certification of skilled tradespeople.

As a feature of this new system, we will also be doing a qualitative analysis of people’s education, rather than just a quantitative one. Until now, if you had a degree from Harvard, we gave that the same weight in our system as a degree from the dodgiest university in the United States. If you had a degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, you got the same points as from a school being run out of the back of someone’s pickup truck. It was just ridiculous. You could submit a piece of paper saying you had a diploma, we gave you the points. Now, we’re actually going to do a qualitative assessment that will be going through the designation of organizations that have expertise in assessing international education.

What will this help us to do? Well, it will help us to ensure that the pool of economic immigrants who come to Canada actually have degrees or diplomas, and education, that’s relevant to our labour market. It’s true that one of the reasons that many foreign-trained professionals have found difficulty getting their licenses to practise is because of a rigid and slow-moving process for certification and credential recognition amongst the licensing bodies. It’s true. That’s a problem we’re trying to deal with. I won’t get into it at length. You have a whole session coming up on it. But it’s also true that we have fed, through our immigration system into Canada, many people who were not even close to the minimal level of training required by our professional licensing bodies.

It’s not the fault of our engineering bodies that they won’t certify folks who actually come here with the equivalent of a Canadian community-college diploma as an engineering technician. It’s not their fault that the person doesn’t meet the Canadian standard. Maybe in some cases, it’s their fault that it takes them too long to get around to an answer. That’s a different matter. But what we hope to do with this new qualitative pre-assessment both of education and, eventually, of credentials for licensed professions, is to create a better qualified pool of applicants who will be going to the professional licensing bodies in due course.

Next month, we will also be pre-publishing a new points grid for our federal skilled worker program. It will be placing greater emphasis on youth – younger immigrants do better – and on language proficiency. Remember, we’re talking here about people who want to work, typically, in professions. On language, we’ll have a more intelligent system. We’ll be requiring lower levels of language proficiency for skilled tradespeople. You don’t need university-level English to be a welder, but you do need some level of English or French to work safely in the workforce. We will also, in the new points grid, be putting more emphasis on Canadian work experience, of course, and particularly on arranged employment in Canada.

Our data tell us that immigrants who arrive with pre-arranged jobs earn incomes that are nearly twice as high as those who arrive without pre-arranged jobs in Canada. And in fact, I think in the New Zealand system now, if I’m not mistaken, over 80 per cent of the primary economic immigrants who are being landed as permanent residents already have a job, and they’re doing phenomenally well.

And here is really the key message I want to convey to those of you who are employers. This is where we see a dynamic link between employers and immigrants abroad being facilitated by our immigration system. Instead of the old approach, the status quo passive system – you apply from abroad, we do a minimal assessment of your human capital, if you meet that, we drop you into the labour market to sink or swim, many people struggle to keep their heads above water – the new system will have this vast pool of pre-qualified applicants accessible to employers. And employers can go beyond that pool, go out and recruit people, get them to apply.

The idea is this: If you get a credible job offer from a credible Canadian employer and you meet our other minimum criteria for human capital, language proficiency and the like, we will admit you as quickly as possible. And it’s saying to employers, “Help us to go abroad. Help us to be proactive. Help us to create a huge Canadian labour recruitment system, facilitated by our immigration system. And I think the potential for this is enormous. It’s very exciting. Neil and I are very conscious of the need for us to work closely with employers, with industry councils and with provinces, on making sure that the system works operationally well for employers, that it doesn’t itself become rigid.

And we have a particular challenge to do that for small-and medium-sized enterprises. And we look forward to working with the Chamber and CFIB and other organizations that can perhaps help us make this new system work for those owner-operated businesses that need workers and can’t find them in Canada, so that they can recruit them from abroad.

Now I know I’ve gone over time significantly, I’m sure, but these are some of the main changes that we will be making. I should also mention the pool of skilled tradespeople, as well. We will also be bringing about reforms to our investor immigrant and entrepreneurial programs. Don’t even get me started on how we’ve been seeing a huge opportunity cost. I mean, there was a poll last year of Chinese millionaires. Sixty-two per cent of them want to migrate to a developed country and 38 per cent of them want to come to Canada. We’re talking about, just in that one country, millions of millionaires. And in our investor immigrant program, we’ve basically been saying to them, “Write us a cheque for $800,000 dollars for five years, we’ll give it back to you at the end of the five years. There’s no risk on your part, and you get the gold standard in world migration, which is permanent residency in Canada.”

No one else does that. Most other developed countries offer temporary residency with an option on permanent residency at a much higher price point. So we are looking at how we can get more economic bang for the buck from that program. And one of the things that I’m most excited about is creating some innovative programs to invite entrepreneurs, businesspeople who may not meet the human capital grid that we have in our skilled worker program, but who have brilliant concepts and who are being – for example – supported by Canadian angel investors or venture capitalists. We want to bring them into the country as well.

As you know, we’ve made improvements on the temporary foreign worker program to reflect the fact that it was becoming very bureaucratic and slow moving. And so now, with the Accelerated Labour Market Opinion and faster processing, I think we are being more responsive. We’re doing good work with the provinces and the licensing bodies to streamline and speed up credential recognition. We’re addressing some of the more politically contentious programs like the Parental Sponsorship Program. We ended up with ridiculous backlogs there, and we’ll be redesigning the program to make it sustainable and fast in the future.

So let me just close on one last thing. I’ve tried to take the time today to outline a number of transformational changes we plan to make to our system, but before I wrap up, I have one last thing to announce. In fact, I’m going to give you a bit of breaking news here today that has a bearing on a couple of the immigration programs I’ve discussed with you. As another important step towards the transformation of our system, I’m announcing today that we will be hitting the reset button on the federal skilled worker program, our main economic immigration program. Effective next week, we will be issuing a temporary pause on new applications for the federal skilled worker program.

This is a way to ensure that improvements to the program have time to be put in place, which will give new applicants the opportunity to be even better positioned to succeed in Canada. I mentioned these changes earlier: A significantly reduced backlog of applications, a revised points grid, and a skilled trades program. We expect to reopen intake on new applications on January 1st of next year without the burden of a large backlog to divert us, and with the improved points grid and new skilled trades program in place.

I should note that this pause will have no effect on the number of skilled workers who we admit to Canada. We’ll continue to admit this year in the range of 55,000 or 60,000. As we have more than enough applications in our inventory, even after the adoption of C-38 today, we’ll still have about 100,000 folks in the inventory. As well, the pause won’t affect applicants who have job offers in hand from Canadian employers. We’ll continue to process them quickly. At the same time, beginning next week, we will also be issuing a temporary pause on new applications for the federal immigrant investor program. This will allow us to work through our existing inventory of applications as we continue to consult on reforming that program.

So I’m glad to have had the opportunity today to talk to you about some of the transformational changes that we are making. This stuff is hugely important to the future of our country. These changes will only work if the private sector and civil society work closely with my ministry in implementing them in a way that is practical and, in a sense, user-friendly. I have to tell you that moving this agenda forward has been challenging politically. We’ve been taking a lot of risks. It’s been operationally challenging to make this much policy change go through the Ottawa pipeline – or the sausage-making machine – in such a relatively short period of time.

It will be operationally challenging for my department to get all of this done but we are absolutely committed to getting this job done. We have been willing to take risks that people didn’t think could be taken, given the sometimes difficult politics of immigration. But we’ve been doing it because we fundamentally believe – and this comes from the Prime Minister, who’s been supporting this agenda all the way through – that this is perhaps the most important long-term question for the future of our country. It defines who we are and it will define, to a very large extent, our future prosperity. And so we look forward to working with all of you as we renew Canada and its reputation as a land of opportunity and promise for people from around the world. Thank you very much.