DATE/DATE:
November 14, 2013, 3:45 p.m.
LOCATION/ENDROIT:
NorQuest College, 10232 106 Street,
Edmonton, Alberta
SUBJECT/SUJET:
Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney holds a news conference to announce funding that will help Canadian and internationally trained nurses get jobs in their field faster.
Hon. Jason Kenney: Well, thank you very much. And I’m really delighted to be here with my colleague, the local Member of Parliament Laurie Hawn, the Honourable Laurie Hawn, who has a lifetime of service to Canada and more recently as a leading Member of Parliament here in Edmonton.
I’m sorry for my tardiness. I was driving up from Calgary and it took a little longer than expected. But thanks for hosting me in your clinic as well. I’m feeling a little bit under the weather. Maybe we could get a little swab or something afterwards.
In fact, just coming in here, I asked my assistant to grab some Cold-FX, so I came to the right spot. And thank you very much, Carolyn, Barbara and Ravi, for coming and participating in today’s important announcement, including Ravi who’s come all the way from Toronto. And Carolyn, you’re from?
Carolyn Trumper: (off microphone) College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta
Hon. Jason Kenney: In?
Carolyn Trumper: In Edmonton.
Hon. Jason Kenney: In Edmonton. Alright, so you didn’t travel that far. Friends, as you know, for five years I served as Canada’s Minister of Immigration. I was actually the longest-serving person in that role in our history, and in that capacity, I got to know so many—hundreds of—new Canadians who arrived here with bright hopes and great promise, only to be frustrated by finding themselves stuck in survival jobs because they could not get their credentials recognized by licensing bodies. They didn’t have relevant work experience for Canadian employers, and so often ended up at the bottom of Canada’s labour market, having left the top of their country of origin’s society.
And for many, many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of new Canadians, this has been an experience of great frustration and often even shame to their families and themselves as they feel sometimes that they were cheated by the invitation to enjoy Canada’s prosperity, only to find themselves struggling to get by to put food on the table for the family, doing basic work from two or three minimum-wage jobs.
We have too many foreign-trained nurses coming to Canada who end up working as hotel maids and too many foreign-trained physicians who end up driving cabs. And it’s actually not just a myth. I mean, you know the joke in Toronto is that the safest place in which to have a heart attack is a taxi cab, because the chances are your driver is a cardiac surgeon. And while it is a joke, there is some truth behind it because in fact we have, according to our data, 300 taxi drivers with doctorate level degrees in medicine. So it is a shame.
And I have met these people, by the hundreds. I’ll never forget, I made a similar announcement here in Edmonton four years ago, where we were providing funding to help an organization in this city train foreign-trained physician immigrants to become paramedics, so at least they could work in the medical field, get reconnected to their skills, work with patients, feel like they were being rewarded while waiting to go through the licensure process with the College of Physicians or find a residency position.
But in that announcement, I met a woman who had been here in Canada for several years, had come from Syria—and as an obstetrician where she had delivered thousands of babies—and she said that after five years in Canada, she’d been three years cleaning hotel rooms in Vancouver and came to Edmonton. And then I remember meeting an Iranian physician, a woman who said after three years she’d run out of her savings, and she felt like she was going to have to go back to Iran, a country which she couldn’t tolerate living in, in order to make some money to put her son through medical school at UBC.
These experiences are far too common, and not only do they represent just an unacceptable failure to realize people’s potential, but it’s also an economic cost for Canada. You know, we admit a quarter of a million immigrants every year—the highest sustained levels of immigration in our history, the highest per capita levels of immigration in the developed world. And everyone realizes with the retirement of the baby boomers starting now, starting this year, more Canadians will be leaving the workforce as retirees than entering it as young people. And so we do need the skills, the talents of newcomers, to fuel our future growth. But we need to put them to work at their skill level. We want those immigrant nurses to be here working as nurses, not as chambermaids, and those foreign-trained doctors as doctors, and not as night watchmen at security.
And that’s very important, especially for our health care system. The need for doctors, nurses and other health care workers is constantly growing and will become even more acute as our society ages. Nurses provide the hands-on care we all need when we’re sick or injured. Everyone who’s spent a little bit of time in a hospital will agree that we simply can’t do without them. But the nursing profession is expected to face labour shortages in the near future, and in some parts of the country already is.
In 2011, the Canadian Nurses Association predicted a shortage of 60 000 registered nurses by the year 2022. Now, as Canadian-born nurses retire, the system will become even more reliant on internationally trained nurses to fill vacancies. Last year, international nursing graduates accounted for almost 8 percent of all regulated nurses employed in Canada, and that percentage is undoubtedly going to go up. So, if we’re going to attract and retain qualified nurses, we have to ensure that assessment and registration processes are clear, timely and impose no artificial behaviours.
So how are we doing in this regard?
Well, not nearly as well as we should. Under the current system, applying to practise nursing in Canada is often a confusing, multi-step process which differs from province to province. Many would-be nurses from other countries go through expensive and time-consuming assessments and training only to find they still can’t get a job in their chosen profession. And it’s not just immigrant nurses who suffer because their credentials aren’t recognized, Canadian-born nurses also face regulatory barriers when they try to move to another province or territory. You know, we have an agreement from the provinces for mutual recognition, but there are a lot of reservations or exceptions, particularly in the field of nursing, that are barriers to mobility.
To help solve this problem, the federal government is funding three projects that will help many nurses get their credentials recognized more easily. But first, I want to say a few words about credential recognition in general.
As I said, it’s a huge challenge for us, which is why our government is investing tens of millions of dollars in working with the over 400 professional licensing bodies from coast to coast to simplify, streamline and, as much as possible, harmonize credential recognition and assessment for regulated professions and indeed trades.
This is really important and difficult work. If there was a simple, easy solution, it would have been found a long time ago. And we at the federal government are not seeking to invade provincial jurisdiction on the regulation of occupations. What we are trying to do is to play a problem-solving, facilitative role, bringing all the provinces to the table, all the different, for example, nursing associations, the engineering associations, the Colleges of Physicians. There are roughly 45 of these professional licensing bodies and, one by one, we are seeking to bring them to a common national table to come up with a streamlined, common, harmonized approach to credential recognition, the goal of which is to give applicants an answer within a year.
And here’s the problem. Remember I mentioned that Iranian physician I met in Vancouver who’d been here? She said, “Minister, I’m no further ahead than I was three years ago in getting my licence, in getting my credentials assessed.” And she said, as so many others have, “If we could just be told early on where we are deficient, then we could go back and do supplementary training or education, maybe an additional diploma program. Or maybe we would choose to go into a different profession or vocation altogether. But please, don’t leave us hanging.”
And that’s really what we are saying to the professional licensing bodies. Remove any unnecessary barriers which might be vestiges of old gate-keeping or protectionist policies, and give people a clear pathway. If it’s known, people will live with that, if they can develop a Plan B to get their licence or go into another occupation. So we’re investing $50 million over several years through our Economic Action Plan in this. It’s called the Pan-Canadian Framework for the Assessment of Foreign Credentials. We’re also giving people a whole lot more information on the credential recognition process before they get to Canada. So hopefully, they can apply online after they’ve been selected as immigrants, but before they’ve actually arrived here, to give them a bit of a head start.
We’re providing—through non-profits and financial institutions now—for micro‑loans of up to $10,000 to help people—foreign-trained professionals—pay for additional education. Often, they have difficulty getting credit. Their savings are depleted. They’re stuck working in survival jobs, and so they just don’t have the financial capacity to go to a college like this and do the supplementary training. So now we are working on preferential terms through financial institutions to give them that financing and a number of other projects.
But one of the things that we’re investing in is particular projects with professional associations, like in the nursing field, to do very practical things. And that’s why I’m very pleased to announce today $4 million in federal funding for three projects that will help speed up credential recognition for trained nurses, allowing them to put their knowledge and skills to work sooner in communities across Canada.
C’est la raison pour laquelle aujourd’hui je suis ravi d’annoncer un investissement de quatre millions de dollars des investissements fédéraux dans trois projets dans trois projets qui aideraient avec l’accélération de reconnaissance des acquis pour les – dans ce domaine et qui va permettre les compétences afin de trouver un emploi plus rapidement au sein des communautés canadiennes.
The Canadian Council of Registered Nurse Regulators is made up of representatives of Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial bodies that regulate the practice of registered nurses. The Council will receive almost $150,000 for their project for nurse practitioners. A nurse practitioner is a registered nurse who has trained to perform some of the primary health care tasks that are usually carried out by physicians. Right now, there is no universally accepted system of accreditation and licensure for nurse practitioners. This means that practitioners who are licensed to work in one province may be unable to find employment in another. Also, there’s no consistency in examinations used across the country in this field, which creates confusion for internationally educated applicants. So the Council’s project will advance a harmonized national approach, exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Secondly, the Registered Psychiatric Nurses of Canada will receive just over $450,000. There is a growing demand in Canada for the services of registered psychiatric nurses, but according to a 2010 report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, less than 0.7 percent of registered nurses have formal education in psychiatric nursing. Internationally educated psychiatric nurses could fill some of these gaps, but when these nurses arrive in Canada and get registered in one province, they may find their qualifications aren’t accepted in another again. So psychiatric nurses with Canadian education face the same challenge.
Currently, registered psychiatric nurses are only recognized in the western provinces and in the Yukon Territory. The Registered Psychiatric Nurses of Canada will explore possible solutions to recognition of RPN qualifications in the central and eastern areas of Canada and the assessment and integration of internationally educated psychiatric nurses wishing to practise in Canada.
Finally, our government will provide $3.4 million to the National Nursing Assessment Service to develop a centralized online application process for all internationally educated nurses seeking registration in Canada. This will save time and money in the assessment of credentials. And after three years, the system’s expected to be able to deal with more than 5 000 applications a year. So this is going to touch a lot of people.
The introduction of a computer-adapted exam means that, in the near future, an internationally educated nurse could be assessed and ready for licence or registration before immigrating to Canada. And some provinces have worked on programs like this—Saskatchewan and the Philippines, for example—to train them up to the Canadian standard before they get here. We think that’s a great way forward.
So all of these projects will help to address labour shortages while improving access to health care for Canadians, and I am really excited about the potential. I want to thank all three of our partners for the good work that they are committed to doing. As I say, you know, if there was a real simple solution to these challenges, it would have been found a long time ago. A lot of this is very detailed work—grinding—because we don’t want to lower the Canadian standard. That’s one thing I always say. This is not about guaranteeing all foreign-trained professionals a yes on their credential application. We don’t know until we assess them what their standards are relevant to the Canadian standard. We’re not looking to diminish that. What we’re looking to do is give people a fairly clear pathway with an answer in a reasonable amount of time, with mobility across Canada—as much as possible, harmonized and common standards. It only makes sense.
So thank you again to our three organizations that will be receiving this funding, and we are confident that you will deliver.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
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