DATE/DATE:
October 17, 2013, 3:30 p.m.
LOCATION/ENDROIT:
1st floor – Plenary Room, Sheraton Suites, Calgary Eau Claire, 255 Barclay Parade Southwest, CALGARY, AB
SUBJECT/SUJET:
Minister of Employment and Social Development and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney delivers the keynote speech at the Skilled Migration National Conference.
Hon. Jason Kenney: Thank you very much and welcome to Calgary, for those of you who are visiting from away, and for those of you who are Calgarians, it’s good to be home. As, I don’t know, somehow I got permission to play hooky today on the first day of Parliament, but I’m delighted to be here. And I’m glad to hear you’re serving poutine tonight (laughter) at the, at the mixer. Stephen from Ireland doesn’t know what it is. You’re going to have to introduce him to the best of Canadian cuisine tonight.
And I want to thank you all for being here because let me tell you part of the genesis of the, of this conference. I know there are a lot of different conferences across the country on questions related to labour markets training, immigration, and as employers, as organizations, you probably wonder which ones are important to go to.
But a year ago, I was with Calgary Economic Development and many Canadian employ-, dozens of Canadian employers attending the Working Abroad Expo at, in Dublin, where of course many Canadian employers have identified Ireland with its highly educated population but high rate of unemployment as an obvious market for, for recruitment of perspective immigrants and workers to come to Canada.
And I was fascinated when I was there, I got there at, in the morning and I think they open the doors at 8:30 or 9:00, and there was already a queue of about 8 000 or 9 000 people waiting to come in to the jobs fair to meet with primarily Canadian employers. Let me tell you an interesting story.
Stephen, who, whose organization organizes that jobs fair, started it as the Working, as the Down Un-, Working Down Under Expo, focused on employers and employment opportunities in Australia and New Zealand, and there was a huge queue of people in the past who would come in and meet prospective employers from Australia and New Zealand, but increasingly Canadian employers started showing up and frankly, crowding out the Aussies and Kiwis, to the point where I think last year, at least three quarters of the exhibitors were Canadian employers.
And I’ll tell you, I, I, you have to understand, Australia and New Zealand have always had a great, kind of seductive appeal to many folks from Britain and Ireland because of cultural similarity and great weather, and, and Canada wasn’t getting the same level of interest. But that’s begun to shift as people have become more conscious of the economic opportunities that are here and many other advantages that we have.
And the interesting thing is I’ve noticed, for example, that there was a, an exhi-, ex-, exhibitor’s booth from Alberta, a regional health authority in Canada trying to get applications for qualified nurses to come here. And there was a queue of about 40 people behind that, in front of that booth. And right next to it, there was a similar booth for one of the Australian states, New South Wales, that only had two people in front of it. I have to tell you, I was very happy to see that.
But the point is, when I went down the, the line of people in the morning who were coming to look at opportunities for employment around the world, I talked to them and, and I would say at, at, at, two-thirds of them told me that they were interested in, in coming to Canada. And a huge number of them said more specifically interested in coming to Calgary because they’d heard that this is a strong labour market.
And so it made me, it opened my eyes to the possibilities that exist abroad. But then I realized that there is so much work we have to do as we are reforming the policy architecture in this country to connect employers, business organizations, unions indeed, provincial licensing bodies for regulated professions and trades, provincial governments in their administration of the provincial nominee programs, of course, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, my own new department, Employment and Social Development, and all of the other players: the educational system, the immigrant settlement organizations.
It made me realize that there have been too many silos in this country as we seek to address the emerging challenge of skill shortages, and we need much more collaboration. We need much more communication, at a level of granular detail, quite frankly, to solve the problems that Bruce discussed in his opening remarks.
And that’s really what I sa-, I talked to Stephen about this and, who, whose organization, SGMC, is, is, they set up Newcomers Canada, and he opened my eyes to some fantastic work that they had been doing in Australia, in part, to connect people who had already immigrated there to employers looking for skilled workers and work that they were doing in Europe and elsewhere around the world to recruit and pre-qualify prospective immigrants, rather than just opening up general job expos, which can have their place, actually triaging folks who have relevant skills for potential working opportunities abroad.
And so I began to realize how much more we could do, for example, to help the large number of unemployed immigrants to Canada fill the skill gaps that many of you, as employers, are facing. So that’s where my idea came.
And also because, as you know, we are on the cusp of what we, what I call the META reform of our many changes to Canada’s immigration system, designed to move from the slow, passive and rigid immigration system of the past, to the fla-, to the fast, flexible and proactive immigration system of the future. And this new system, this new Expression of Interest model, which will be addressed by my colleague, Chris Alexander, in some detail tomorrow, opens the door to enormous opportunity to Canadian businesses to be full partners in our immigration system, in selecting people with relevant skills to come to Canada as new permanent residents, with a track to citizenship.
But in order for that Expression of Interest system to work, we need employers to be engaged in its design as Immigration Canada gets down to the short strokes next year and actually designing the Expression of Interest pool, we are going to need settlement organizations, employer organizations, groups like the Economic and Development Associations, Chambers of Commerce and individual employers to tell us how to design that system to make it administratively light and relevant to, to your particular needs.
So I thought it would be useful as well to have a forum such as this to begin bringing together all of those organizations to provide useful input and have a real substantive dialogue between the government ministries and officials designing these new systems and employers who will be hopefully using them effectively.
But of course, there is a broader context here. And the broader context is what Bruce discussed, which is—in the words of our Throne Speech yesterday, delivered by Governor General Johnston—Canada has one of the best educated workforces in the world, but there are too many people without jobs and too many jobs without people.
I see it as my overriding objective as the new Minister for jobs, the new Minister for Employment to address this paradox of too many jobs without people in an economy that has too many people without jobs. Now, Bruce mentioned a number of the estimates about future skills shortages in our economy and I know a number of you-, the groups here, have done their own studies in this respect.
You know, for example, we have the Chamber of Commerce saying that the skills shortage is one of Canada’s top 10 barriers to competitiveness. Its sur-, survey showed that a third of the owners of small-and medium-sized businesses identified skills shortages as a constraint on growth. Experts in the construction sector say they will need 319 000 new workers before 2020. Those in the mining industry estimate they will need 145 000 more workers, mostly skilled people, in the next decade.
The petroleum sector will need 9 500 workers by 2015, and between 50 000 and 130 000 workers by 2020. In the supply chain sector, they expect a shortage of 357 000 workers between now and 2020.
Just yesterday, I met with the Information Technology Association of Canada, who estimates that the current unemployment rate in the information and communica-, communications technology sector is only 2 percent and they’ve estimated, based on two robust studies, a shortage of workers in their sector, a high value-added sector with high-paying jobs of 160 000 people by 2016.
The estimates go on, and of course, part of what we are seeing here is the consequences of the demographic change. We’ve been talking for decades about the demographic time bomb of the boomers’ retirement and now, we are beginning to experience it.
In the context of a relatively strong economy—of course, the economy’s not growing at the pace that we would all like and there are too many unemployed Canadians, I’ll say more that in a moment—but the truth is that in co-, the context of the major developed economies of the world, Canada is doing extremely well. The Euro Zone is still in negative growth, Japan is still barely keeping itself above negative growth, the United States of course, facing a fiscal crisis and all the other uncertainties, but here in Canada, we are seeing steady growth, the creation of 1.1 million net new jobs in the last, well, since the global downturn ended, the vast majority of those in high-paying, private sector, full-time positions.
So we have growth in the economy, growth in the labour market, more Canadians working now than ever before in our economic history in the context of a population where the workforce is beginning to shrink. And yet, there is this paradox that we still have 1.3 million unemployed Canadians, 13 percent youth unemployment. Now, the good news is that youth unemployment is actually lower now than it has traditionally been at this point in the economic cycle, and it is substantially lower than in most other developed countries, but 13 percent is still far too high. In certain areas, it’s ridiculously high. In Toronto, the unemployment rate for youth is in the range of 20 percent.
Of course, we have unacceptably high unemployment amongst Aboriginal Canadians. There are tens of thousands of Canadians with disabilities who would like the opportunity to go into the productive workforce. Increasingly, people who we thought were of an age where they wouldn’t want to continue working are interested in doing so beyond the traditional retirement age.
Of course, we have, in many areas including our manufac-, old manufacturing communities, regrettably significant numbers of older manu-, unemployed manufacturing workers who would be delighted to go into gainful employment if they had the relevant skills. And of course, we have certain regions with stubbornly high double-digit unemployment.
And so, there is this paradox, I can’t understand it myself, when I go and meet with a CEO of one of our largest auto parts manufacturers operating in Southern Ontario, [that] employs tens of thousands of people, who tells me he’s desperately looking for machinists and people with very specialized skills from Europe because there is a critical shortage of them in Canada. And I said and look, you’re operating in Cambridge, in, in, in Kitchener–Waterloo, in, in St. Catharines, you’re operating in communities where over the past six years, we have seen over 300 000 manufacturing workers, traditional manufacturing jobs lost.
Why is it that you can’t get those people and train them up? I was, just last week, in Chatham, Ontario, meeting with educators, employers, unions and others, and they, they, a couple of years ago, they lost 2 000 jobs in a community of 45 000 people when a trucking plant closed and moved its operations to the United States. Two thousand high-paying manufacturing jobs lost, and yet, I’m there meeting with people, with business owners who are talking about particular skills shortages in the manufacturing sector. There’s something fundamentally wrong.
You know, last week, I was also in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and I met with fish processing plant owners and operators from around New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and the Ministers of Fisheries of those two provinces. Get this. They, they urgently wanted to talk to me about the problem of labour shortages in their communities for people to work in fish processing plants.
And every community from which their, in which their, their factors are situated have double-digit unemployment and have had double-digit unemployment for 15 or 20 years, or longer. How does this make any sense? That they would have actually, you know, 12, 15, 17 percent unemployment in communities where there are jobs. And they tell me, by the way, that they’re paying 16, 18, sometimes as much as $20 an hour, with incentives all in, for that kind of work, and yet, there are people on, unemployed in the same communities.
And more peculiarly yet, there are people in those communities who traditionally are on Employment Insurance and yet, the fish processing plant operators tell me they’re going to have to shut down or move their work to Maine if they can’t get access to workers from abroad through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
So there are all sorts of frankly, aberrations, of mysteries in our labour market. It is not operating as it should be in a modern, productive economy. And we can continue to, as policy makers, as governments, as business leaders, we continue to sort of ignore those problems and continue to just seek to bring people in, for example, through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, without addressing the rigidities, the lack of productivity and mobility in our own domestic labour market. But I think we would do so at our peril.
So what I really want to talk to you about today is yes, the opportunities afforded by our new immigration system, but also what we can and must do to bring our own, the, the, the Canadians who are currently unemployed, who have fallen out of the labour market into productive employment. This is a huge national challenge, and it’s one that we can no longer neglect.
Now, our government has been addressing this with all of the policy levers at our disposal. For example, recognizing that there’s a particularly acute shortage in the skilled trades like the construction trades particu-, oh, before I get to that, I have to make one more, sort of, general comment, which is this.
So we heard from Bruce the narrative about acute skill and labour shortages. And yet, every time I meet an academic economist, she or he tells me that there is no such thing as a labour or skill shortage in Canada, that it’s all an invention of businesses who are seeking an excuse to keep wa-, wage rates down, and that, they tell me, based on the StatsCan data, that the help wanted index, which is how StatsCan measures the number of positions that are available for employment in the economy, is lower than it normally is at this stage in an economic cycle, that the ratio between the help wanted index and the number of unemployed Canadians is actually quite low for this period in the cycle, and that on an aggregate national level, wage and salary levels have barely kept pace with inflation in the past couple of years.
And they say to me how is it possible, I’m talking about economists here at the University of Calgary, I’m talking about some of the most prominent pu-, private sector economists in the country who have published on this, and what they maintain is we cannot possibly have the, the, the bogeyman of the skill and labour shortages because if we did, we would see substantially higher increases in wagers and, wages and salaries. That is to say that is the measurement of the market response to labour shortages.
And of course, some of the unions repeat the same line ad nauseam, I think, for their own particular reasons. And, and so the public ends up being confused. The public doesn’t understand this. They just intuitively look at this and say well, 7 percent unemployment, 1.3 unemployed Canadians, how could there possibly be skill or labour shortages?
Now, one of the cha-, problems here is frankly a technical one, that we do not have adequate labour market information in our country, and I acknowledge that. And so I am working with my ministry and, and others to try to correct that by providing more robust, sector and region specific labour market information. Because I think one of the things we can take from Bruce’s presentation is that the national aggregate picture does not reflect the reality in certain regions and industries. So that’s one, one take-away. And we are working, as I say, to improve the labour market information system.
But frankly, I think there’s a fundamental gap here between what we’re measuring based on old metrics and the practical lived reality in the labour market that you face every single day, because here’s my frustration. I run into this wall of incomprehension amongst many of the interest groups, most of the union movement, many of the academic economists and most Canadians who intuitively do not understand the reality of current or future labour and skill shortages. I run into that wall.
And on the other hand, I talk and I have for the last seven years, I’ve literally spoken with thousands of Canadian employers, small, medium and large, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Tofino, British Columbia, and ev-, virtually every single one of those employers has told me their number one challenge in the economy today is the skills gap.
How do you explain this paradox? I’m not quite sure that I know. Again, there seems to be gaps in the data, which we need to correct. But one of the things I want to encourage—those of you who are employers and, and business and sector organizations—to do is a much better job of helping us to explain to Canadians these realities.
And by the way, that kind of information, I think, can also have salutary effects in terms of in-, of, of getting younger Canadians for example, to make the right career and vocational choices.
One of the things that we have committed to do in the last budget, and I’m now working on in my ministry, is a program of information that is relevant and, and, and interesting, presented, for example, through social media, to young Canadians, explaining to them the potential outcomes in different careers and vocations, explaining to them for example, that they can end up making three times more as a welder than as someone with a B.A. in political science.
So, you know, if they want to go ahead and get the B.A. in political science, God knows there’s a glut of those—I work in Ottawa—but if they want to go and, and, and get the B.A. in political science, God bless them. But at least, they should know that that’s no longer to track to high levels of income necessarily, or a reliable job in the future.
So we need the sectors, the industry sectors, and frankly, the unions, especially the private-sector unions who understand the reality. I talked to the building and trades union, I sat down with even Ken Georgetti, the President of the Canadian Labour Congress last, two weeks ago. I think he and I both, were both a bit frightened because we found that we agreed with each other on almost everything. (Laughter) He understood the reality of these shortages in many sectors and regions and the need to address them. So that’s one kind of high-level point I wanted to emphasize.
Now, we are doing what we can with the policy levers at our disposal to address the domes-, what I’ll call the domestic labour market challenges, the challenge of increasing labour mobility, participation and productivity, especially from amongst historically under-represented groups in our labour force. As the Throne Speech said yesterday, our government will take further steps to see that those traditionally under-represented in the workforce, including people with disabilities, youth, and Aboriginal Canadians, find the job training they need.
Now, we’re doing that through a number of things. For example, the Apprenticeship Incentive Grant, which is a $1,000 taxable cash grant for apprentices who completed the, the first or second level of their apprenticeship program in a designated Red Seal trade, to a maximum of $2,000. And that’s been in place since 2006.
Then in 2009, we introduced the Apprenticeship Completion Grant, recognizing that there’s a, a huge glut of people registered in apprenticeship programs who are not completing them and that we have a real crisis of apprenticeship completion, so we announced in 2009, the Apprenticeship Completion Grant, which is a $2,000 taxable cash grant for eligible apprentices who succes-, successfully comp-, complete their apprenticeship training and receive their journeyperson certification in a Red Seal trade.
And now, we’re looking, as the Throne Speech intimated yesterday, at further measures to incentivize apprenticeship completion. We are spending billions of dollars on skills development and job training programs. In fact, $2.5 billion just for the, through the, what are called the labour market, labour market development agreements, and we are now moving to ensure that we spend those dollars more effectively.
For example, in the last budget, we proposed the Canada Jobs Grant that would see employers, provinces and the federal government all participate in providing, in covering the costs of trai-, training that leads to a guaranteed job. In the past, so much of the training has been what I call a churn where governments fund non-profit organizations or, or vocation institutes who provide specific training in one particular category for people who are distant from the labour market, people who have not been eligible for Employment Insurance in the past six years.
A lot of those programs entail bringing in people who, who are habitual welfare recipients and teaching them basic life skills like how to dress for an interview, set their alarm clock in the morning, how to write a resume, all of which is useful, but quite frankly, not typically very productive, and does not address this urgent national problem of the skills gap.
And so what we’re saying is look, we have listened to business who have sa-, businesses who have said to us that they know better than big, passive government programs. Who in the labour market can actually get to work with what incremental training? So what we’re proposing through the Job Grant is that businesses, employers would nominate individuals for specific training programs at the end of which there would be a guaranteed job.
Now, we’re trying to work out an arrangement with the provinces. I’m going to be sitting down with my counterpart ministers and proposing all sorts of flexibilities in the ratios and what constitutes eligible training, how we pay for all of this. But suffice it to t-, to say at a high level, what we’re trying to do is drive some of those public training dollars into actual job creation, and not just training for the sake of training.
And of course, we also spend, at the federal level and with provincial governments, and I want to acknowledge the presence of several provincial deputy ministers here, we collectively spend billions of dollars in skills development and job training for Aboriginal Canadians, for youth, we have the federal Youth Employment Strategy, for older unemployed workers and so on.
So there’s a big spend going on. Oh, by the way, one other very important thing in this respect. Employment Insurance. Our government has, has been widely criticized in parts of this country for having brought in a number of important improvements to the Employment Insurance program.
Employment Insurance should be just that. It should be an insurance program for peo-, for people who can’t find a job, who can’t find a job in their local area at their skill level. Employment Insurance should not pay people not to work in communities where there are jobs available at their skill level. Now, it’ s a bit ridiculous, but I shouldn’t even have to say this, but apparently, expectations became a bit distorted around this program, which is why last year, we brought in an initiative, excuse me, earlier this year, called Connecting Canadians With Available Jobs that clarifies the longstanding, implicit obligation of the Employment Insurance system for people who, in order to receive the benefits, they must demonstrate that they have actively sought work at their skill level in their local area.
We’re not telling them that to move across the country, we’re not telling unemployed university professors that they have to become fruit pickers, God forbid. We are telling people who, per-, perhaps in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, who worked in the chocolate factory and then got EI, that if there’s a job available in the chocolate fla-, factory, they have to take that rather than go on EI.
Now, this has been very controversial and our government has paid a certain political price for it, but it was the right thing to do. And it’s too early to, to tell, to get much aggregate data on this, but I can tell you anecdotally that we have heard, just last night, I was in Ottawa meeting with some employers from Quebec who told me that in their regions of ty-, typically high unemployment, they now see more people coming to work, applying for and working in their local communities as a direct result, and I’ve heard this from other employers in Atlantic Canada and around the country.
So this is important, cause every little bit helps to increase labour participation and productivity.
That’s, those are some of the things we are doing, but much more needs to be done on this front. We need, and much is, much of this is beyond the reach, frankly, of the federal government. Now, for example, many provinces, not Alberta, but, but a number of other provinces have very strict regulations on the ratio of the number of apprentices who could work on a work site to the number of ticketed journeymen.
In some provinces, I understand the ratio is as high four or five journeymen to every apprentice. Now, maybe this made sense in the 1970’s when, quite frankly, some unions were trying to protect, gatekeep the number of new entrants into that sec-, into that sector. Maybe it made sense in the 1970’s. But now, when we can all agree that we are facing a critical shortage of construction tradespeople, why would we be limiting the number of apprentices who can go through the system when other provinces have demonstrated that you don’t need those ratios in order to maintain a safe work site.
So next month, when I meet with the Forum of Labour Market Ministers, that unfortunately, the first such meeting there’s been in four years, I will be asking that the provinces seriously review the many regulatory barriers that exist that they have created and perhaps are an accretion of old rules going back three or four decades, to review those and to remove any barriers that exist unnecessarily to training Canadians for, for the workforce of the future, for example, particularly in the apprentices and the skilled trades.
And of course, we need to address the broader issue of the spending in our education system. You know, Germany, strongest labour market in Europe, 7.5 percent youth unemployment, has half as many Canadian kids, excuse me, German kids going to university as we do in Canada. The rate of post-secondary academic enrolment in Canada is twice as high as it is in Germany, but our unemployment rate amongst youth is almost three times as high.
Is there a direct correlation? I don’t know. But I think there’s an awful lot of data that suggests governments have been subsidizing forms of post-secondary education which do not, which are not necessarily linked to the labour market. And to be even more explicit, we all know that in the past 30 or 40 years—education bureaucracies, school boards, teachers’ union—all ended up diminishing massively our vocational secondary school training system.
You know, the teachers’ unions for example, demanded that everyone teaching a class in a school had to have a certificate from teacher’s college. Alright? Good for the union. Bad for the mechanic who might used to be teaching shop, which is why there were so many fewer shop classes and so many fewer vocational high schools. And so you had all, I think, you know, let me be blunt with you. I think policy makers, politicians, bureaucrats and others, with their own backgrounds in academic post-secondary education, had perhaps an implicit bias towards that form of education in the allocation of scarce public resources in education.
And so, I think we need a paradigm shift here in this country when it comes to education from the junior secondary level all the way up through post-secondary. I want to invite my provincial counterparts to go with me to Germany to study closely their (inaudible) dual training system. Not that it’s perfectly relevant to Canada, a lot of structural differences between the two countries and the two economies.
But how is it, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves, how is it that you’ve got the entire educational system—unions, employers, small, medium and large, state and federal government—all working together in the same direction to ensure that training and education is actually relevant to the labour market? How is it that they have 7.5 percent youth unemployment and we have 13 percent youth unemployment in an economy with large and growing skill and labour shortages?
Shouldn’t we move beyond the same old, same old and start asking ourselves what fundamental changes are necessary? Shouldn’t we be challenging some of the sacred cows and some of the, some of the rigidities we’ve, we’ve grown accustomed to in our country’s education and training system? I think so.
Now, much of this is beyond, I should always say of course, et je dois le dire en français qu’évidemment, le gouvernement du Canada respecte entièrement les champs des compétences des provinces, provinces particulièrement dans le domaine de l’éducation. Point.
I had to say that in French, that obviously we respect the competence of provinces in their areas of jurisdiction, particularly education, and we don’t intend to intervene in that. But I think, you know what? If there’s one thing that the Go-, Government of Canada is supposed to do in our Constitution, it’s to maintain the idea of the economic union. And speaking of which, how does it make any sense today, that it’s easier to move from Bulgaria to Ireland as a physician, and practise the next day, than it is to move from Saskatchewan to Alberta and do the same?
How does it make any sense that in the 28 member states of the European Union, many of whom had hundreds of years of conflict, have different languages, different legal systems, that they could have virtually full labour market reciprocity that we do not yet have here in Canada. And so next month, when I meet with my, the labour market ministers, I will be saying we need not just a renewed commitment to the labour mar-, to the labour mobility agreement, we need real action. We need to bring down those barriers.
And when we’re bringing down barriers, we need real action on the commitment that provinces gave to the Prime Minister in 2009, to simplify and streamline the process for foreign credential recognition. We, we need to move beyond the gatekeeping, the protectionism that has existed for far too long.
You know, tomorrow, the Prime Minister is going to be in Brussels. Rumour has it that he may be signing the most important trade agreement in Canada’s economic history since NAFTA. And I would not be surprised to find in that agreement certain commitments about expanded labour mobility. Why is it that we can get, Europe can do this, and we can do it with Europe but we can’t do it within Canada?
Now, speaking of foreign credential recognition, I think that’s a good segue to discuss the changes we’ve made, I’m sorry, this is an immigration conference and I’ve spoken too much about the domestic labour market, but it’s all related, you know. I’ll, I’ll tie it together as I close on immigration, issues that my colleague, Chris Alexander, will be developing at greater length tomorrow.
Look, I am so excited, and I hope you are, about the fundamental changes that we have made. You know, I don’t think people really understand, many people don’t understand the full, the full implications of the new immigration system that we’ve de-, been developing over the past few years.
First of all, radically better geographic distribution of primary immigrants across Canada. Eighty percent used to go to Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. That’s down to something like 60 percent, as we have tripled immigration to the Prairies, doubled it in Atlantic Canada, increased it significantly in the North. We now have an immigration system, thanks in large measure, to our massive expansion of the provincial nominee programs. That is bringing immigrants to where many of the best job opportunities are.
And about half of the primary immigrants coming through those provincial nominee programs already have prearranged jobs when they land in Canada, or they’re already working because they came here initially as temporary foreign workers on work permits. That is good news.
When our government came to office in 2006, the year before, I think we’d only admitted, Canada only admitted about 4 000 temporary foreign workers, excuse me, provincial nominees, and this year, we will be admitting over 40 000. There has been a tenfold increase in the number of immigrants selected by provinces.
My apologies to Ontario, who I think is represented here, but when that growth started, Ontario, for whatever reason, was not interested in getting on board the provincial nominee program train, and we, we acknowledge that, and we acknowledge the need to, and I know Chris Alexander will, will address this, to ensure that some of the benefits of PN programs also flow to Ontario.
But as those programs have grown, let me be honest with you cause we’ve got a no-, a number of the provincial deputy ministers here and a lot of, of practitioners who deal with the PN programs. We need to ensure that those programs are achieving their goal of actually addressing labour and skills shortages.
You know, the whole idea of all of our immigration reforms has been that it made no sense to admit a quarter of a million people a year to maintain the highest absolute level of immigration in our history, to maintain the highest per capita levels of immigration in the developed world, only to see too many of those immigrants facing unemployment or under employment in an economy, one of whose primary challenge is labour and skill shortages.
It made no sense, you know the numbers. The rate of unemployment amongst recent immigrants, those who have been here for 10 years or less, is 13 percent, twice, almost twice as high as the national average. The rate of unemployment for immigrants with university degrees, recent immigrants with college degrees, four times higher than for people born in Canada with university degrees.
You know, we all know, you’ve all heard the joke, what’s, where’s the safest place in, in Toronto to have a heart attack? In the back of a cab because chances are that your driver is a cardiac surgeon. And behind that joke, there are too many true stories.
So what was our old immigration system doing, apart from making people wait for, like, seven, eight, nine years for their PR application? Apart from sending virtually everyone to just the biggest metropolitan areas, rather than distributing them to parts of the country that needed them most? Apart from those failures, it was a passive system. It basically laid out a human capital bar, and it said if you can get over that bar, even just barely, even if your education has no relevance to the Canadian standard, even if your professional credentials won’t be recognized by a Canadian regulatory body, we will give you permanent residency. Good luck. You’re here to sink or swim.
And there is, has been too much human tragedy, too many people sinking in that system, too many people barely keeping their heads above water, too many people, after years of frustration, going back to their countries of origin because they feel like they were cheated, people leaving the top social economic strata of their countries of origin to come here to face unemployment or under employment. It cannot continue. It doesn’t have to continue in this economy with skills shortages.
In a world where there is virtually an infinite number of people who want to come here, yes, we can afford to be selective, to calibrate our system, to admit people who don’t just have, in an abstract sense, higher levels of human capita, but who have precise education and professional experience, and qualifications that are immediately relevant to the Canadian labour market. As I always say, the objective of our immigration reforms is to bring foreign engineers here so that they can work as engineers and not as night watchmen on the graveyard shift.
And so the provincial nominee program, it’s important that it focus on that objective. And that’s why we, we’ve said to provinces last year, that we want to ensure that they are maximizing, than (sic) the scarce number of spots they get to nominate for permanent residency people who already have good jobs or who have good job offers to the greatest extent possible, and, and, and then the lower end, ensure people have at least minimum English or French language proficiency—pour qu’ils puissent bouger dans le marché du travail au Canada—so they can actually move within the labour market if they’re laid off. They have some horizontal mobility in the labour market.
And I want to encourage you, the provinces who are here and those who are involved in that program, you know, I really want to encourage you. You know, avoid using your scarce PN allocations just to respond to certain interest group pressure, whether that’s from particular communities or particular industry sectors, please realize there’s not going to be continued 1000 percent growth in the PN allocation. Realize that we’re really hitting the upper limit of where that program can go in terms of admissions in the context of our overall limits on immigration, and maximize the value of those spots as best you possibly can.
The Canadian Experience Class that our government brought in. Gosh, why wasn’t this a permanent feature of our immigration system? Now, finally, those brilliant young foreign students who have got degrees that will be recognized by Canadian employers from Canadian universities and colleges, who have English or French language fluency, who are young, and thanks to our open work permits, have already good job experience in Canada, are invited to stay in Canada without leaving and to get their PR in a relatively fast basis, as opposed to the old broken system where they were told to leave the country and if they wanted to come back in, to get in the back of a seven-year long queue.
And of course, the CEC is a great alternative. I remind provinces who are struggling with the pressures on their PN programs, the C, Canadian Experience Class is a great alternative for those who have employment in, in, you know, in Canada in skilled occupations, they’ve got, we brought the threshold from 24 months down to 12 months to get their permanent residency.
And by the way, Stephen, our friend from Ireland here, will, will tell you, remind you, there’s a huge pool of folks who don’t come into the country as conventional temporary foreign workers with labour market opinions, tied to a particular employer but who come in through our large youth mobility programs. Every year, we welcome some 60 000 young folks from basically developed countries with high levels of education, places like Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Ire-, etc. We, we, we, we, we welcome them to Canada. They have open work permits, some for 12 months, some for 24 months.
And you know, yeah, some of those kids go down to my favourite pub here in Calgary, the James Joyce, and you’ll find some of them slinging, pulling pints of Guinness back behind the bar there, God bless them. And some, you’ll talk to some of those people and they’re, and, and, and they’re architects and engineers. When you’re looking at recruitment, look at that pool.
I think we have maybe all together about 100 000 participants in the youth mobility programs who are in this country, English and French-speaking, ma-, almost all of them well educated and some of them with very high levels of skills that could yo-, that could come in through the Canadian Experience Class.
The new Federal Skilled Worker Program, high levels of language proficiency, and of course, a program that now actually works quickly, by the way. Wait, wait times used to be seven years. They’re now down to two years. By the time we open up the door and the Expression of Interest system next, it’ll be down to one year, we hope. And the most important thing was the requirement in the new, in the revised Federal Skilled Worker Program that applicants must submit a, an evaluation of their education, educational credentials done by credible, designated third party.
And this is going to radically improve the pool of federal selected economic immigrants in the future because no longer will we be doing a (frankly dumb) quantitative analysis of their post-secondary education. We will now be doing a qualitative analysis of its relevance to the Canadian labour market. Why were we giving the same points to people with a degree from Harvard as a degree from the dodgiest degree mill in the United States or in the world? Made no sense.
Now, the people who go in, come in through the Federal Skilled Worker Program in the future will actually have degrees that will be recognized, we believe, by Canadian employers.
Reforms to the Family Reunification program and to our refugee humanitarian programs, important ongoing parts of our immigration system. And don’t forget, these people constitute a labour force for you. Now, what we’re trying to do with our reforms in this area is, is, is to modestly increase the percentage of immigrants who are primary selected economic immigrants chosen based on their human capital.
But we’re also trying to, for example, welcome perhaps refugees in a world of, where there’s no shortage sadly of refugees, I think we can afford perhaps to target those for resettlement to Canada who are a little more adaptable, who perhaps aren’t going to find themselves depressed and permanently unemployed, but those who have at least some basic life skills, perhaps some basic literacy, some capacity to integrate. I know we’ve got some of the immigrant settlement organizations who work with these people.
And you know what? Many, I know many of you are looking for highly educated, you know, petroleum engineers and tradesmen, but many of, but many of the industries, just last week, I was down in, in Southern Alberta, in Medicine Hat, greenhouse operators, agricultural operators, desperate for “unskilled labour,” the fish processing plants in Atlantic Canada. You know, the beef processing plant in Brooks, JBS, formerly Lakeside, has a workforce, some of these, what’s the, about 2 300 workers there? And only 10 percent of them are temporary foreign workers.
Let me repeat that. Only 10 percent are here on work permits from abroad. That company has done a brilliant job of very intentionally recruiting from typically amongst, and I go out there, I don’t have the stat, the statistics on this, but I am certain that the vast majority of people in their workforce came here as resettled refugees. Am I right about that, (inaudible)?
And many, many resettled refugees from East Africa, and listen, they could be, their option is they could be sitting around in a public housing unit in Toronto, unemployed, or they could be making whatever it is, $16 to $18, $20 an hour, perhaps with, with, am I bringing up your wage prices at JBS? I hope not. (laughter) I hope I am actually, but making good money in a lovely rural Alberta community where they can be integrated and then their kids, of course, will go on to be university presidents.
So look, these things are possible. And we’re trying to ensure that the refugees for example, who come in in family class immigrants have some more economic skills as well.
And then the Expression of Interest pool. My goodness, I’m sorry I’ve been speaking so long, but this is huge. This is really what I hope comes out of this conference, which is an understanding amongst you as employers, as settlement organizations, as provincial governments, as other stakeholders, is how you can participate fully in this new system. You know, we’re trying to learn from the best experience in Australia and New Zealand, and in, in, in a similar system.
And I’ll, I’ll leave the balance of this to, to Chris Alexander, but really, the challenge is this. How can you as employers, instead of looking at the Temporary Foreign Worker Pro-, how can you in part, look to that permanent residency program that will exist, that will, I hope, in the future, it will complement the provincial nominee programs in being an employer-driven, market-based fast pool of international talent where you can bring people in, where they have a prearranged job upon arrival.
One thing I have to mention, I always hear this criticism, you know, we need more evidence-based policy. Everything I have talked about is based on evidence. The data tells us consistently that immigrants who arrive with a prearranged job earn twice as much as those that don’t. It’s just, it also happens to be common sense.
Finally, I know many of you want to hear me talk about the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, or frankly, many of you may want to throw buns at me about that. Look, all of this is to say that we need much more collaboration on increasing the mobility and productivity, participation of unemployed Canadians, especially amongst under-represented groups in the labour force, like Aboriginals. That has to be goal number one.
And I don’t want to hear any employers coming to me or the government in the future, saying that you need faster and more facilitative access to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program unless and until you tell me first of all, what you are doing to, like JBS, recruit unemployed or under-employed Canadians, including many new, newcomers to this country.
Now, I know there’s a great deal of frustration amongst many of you as employers with the recent modifications to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. I know there’s frustration with, particularly with processing times now for labour market opinions. I hear you, I, I feel your pain. You have to listen to the public. And again, it goes back to the beginning. You know, we talk about, in this province, we talk about the need for social license, for responsible resource development.
We also need social license, if you will, some kind of a political consensus on things like the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Because Canadians just don’t get it. They don’t understand why their niece or nephew, son or daughter, can’t find a job, but you’re looking to bring someone in from abroad.
And so, what we are trying to do in the TFW reforms is to strike that sensible balance, to make sure that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is only a last resort, not a first resort. That you as employers are doing everything you reasonably can to invest in training, to actively recruit, to retain Canadians. I know the challenges, I know in some sectors, in some areas, there’s just not the people available, I know that in, in, there’s the problem of poaching for especially SMEs. We understand the challenges.
And that’s why we are working on round two to the reforms, which will look at possibly a discreet—I repeat discreet—limited, narrow, accelerated process for LMOs. And Stephen, I hope we can extend, now that I’ve eaten up the whole time for my speech, I hope we can extend this for questions and comments a little bit, cause I want to get from you, either here or in writing, your ideas. Honestly, I’m, look, I’m sitting down with Chris Alexander and the officials in the next couple of months to hammer out a proposal to Cabinet on the next round of TFW reforms.
And you know, since our government came to office, the number of, as, as the Alberta Federation of Labour will remind you every day, the number of temporary foreign workers being given work permits has gone from 120 000 to over 200 000 per year. The total number working in Canada, we estimate, has gone up to 330 000, I believe. And we simply, I think, cannot continue that kind of, of velocity.
One of the reforms that we made earlier this year was to require the, the transition plan. And I know this is a hassle for many employers, but we think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a useful hassle, to kind of force your HR directors to sit down and actually think through this and tell us what can you possibly do, think creatively, talk to companies like JBS, share best practices at a conference like this, what can you possibly do to increase the ratio of workers who are already here in Canada?
And if you can demonstrate to us that Canadians really aren’t available or that these are really specialized skills that are just generally not available in our country, then we will make the work permits and labour market opinions available. And I acknowledge we have to do so more efficiently. I know five- or six-month wait times are not acceptable and we are, we, we’ve taken on board the constructive criticism that we receive from you and we will be addressing that.
Let me conclude by saying that for all the, the complexity of all of these challenges, we should be hugely optimistic. You know what? These are darn good problems to have, aren’t they? Managing the challenge of growth, having unfilled jobs is a much better challenge than most countries in the western world are facing. Of course, in the developed, under-developed world.
In Southern Europe right now, in Portugal, Italy, Greece, the youth unemployment rate is in the range of 40 to 55 percent. So let’s just, I mean that’s very sad for them, perhaps also represents an opportunity for us, but the point is in perspective, the problems that we’re challenge, that we’re challenged with now are very, are good problems to have. Fundamentally, what we all need to do—educators, unions, employers, provinces, the federal government, regulatory bodies, all, as immigrant settlement organizations, all, and all of the practitioners in the field—what, we all need to work together rowing in the same direction.
You have our commitment to do that and look forward to your questions. Thank you very much.
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