Ottawa needs to balance common sense and compassion in immigration reform

To hear Stephen Harper’s government tell it, Canada’s immigration system is in dire need of a fix, and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney intends to deliver it. In a meeting with the Star’s editorial board this past week Kenney sketched out bold plans for a faster, more flexible system that will give “the best and the brightest” newcomers a better chance to succeed, and will rely less on temporary workers.

In effect, Kenney envisages filling gaps in the labour market by importing more highly qualified workers on a permanent basis, helping them to hit the ground running, and curbing our reliance on temporary foreign workers in areas where joblessness is high.

While he has come in for criticism, especially on plans to curb the number of asylum-seekers we admit, there’s much to like in his approach to the broader immigration file. Provided, that is, that he leavens common sense with compassion.

Importantly, Kenney committed his government to maintaining Canada’s intake of more than 250,000 immigrants a year. We will remain one of the developed world’s welcoming countries, benefiting from the skills, resources, energy and fresh ideas that newcomers bring. That’s good policy when our labour force is aging.

Kenney also wants to ensure that newcomers succeed economically, and he assured the Star that he will preserve the current rough balance among economic, family and humanitarian categories of immigrants. That, too, is good news.

As Kenney argues, and studies confirm, many newcomers aren’t doing as well as they might or as others have done in the past. There’s a perverse phenomenon of underemployment or even unemployment among immigrants, despite acute labour shortages in parts of the country. That’s a glaring mismatch.

To address it, Ottawa intends to overhaul the skilled worker point system to put more emphasis on younger immigrants with relevant Canadian work experience who are fluent in English or French. Ottawa also intends to work with the provinces and with employers to identify jobs that are going begging, and to fast-track immigrants to fill them. As well, there will be pre-screening of foreign credentials.

This shift to a speedier, more targeted system, while welcome, is not without losers. Kenney is wiping out a waiting list of more than 200,000 applicants who applied to come before 2008, and whose skills don’t necessarily relate to current needs. The backlog has left workers waiting years to be admitted. Kenney’s critics regard the change as draconian and unwarranted. Essentially, Ottawa failed to process the backlog and is now taking the easy way out.

More controversially, Kenney proposes to address a growing anomaly in Canada’s labour market: we import a small army of temporary foreign workers — nearly 200,000 last year — to do jobs that Canadians aren’t willing to do, even in areas where a lot of people are unemployed. That includes Russians working in a Prince Edward Island fish processing plant in an area of double-digit unemployment.

The answer, Kenney says, is to make sure that Canadians who are collecting employment insurance benefits are offered jobs in their communities, so that foreign workers are not needed to plug those gaps. Going forward, EI recipients will be expected take the work that’s available. Sound as that principle is, it will not be easy to enforce.

Just how much pressure is Ottawa prepared to bring on employers to hire locally rather than seek out foreign workers who are content to ply tough jobs at low wages? And how tough will Ottawa be on local workers who balk at taking them?

As with immigration reform, this will require leavening hard-headed pragmatism with compassion, a mix that this government has not always gotten right.

Original Article
Source: Star
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