New temporary foreign worker pilot program to speed up approvals for some employers

2023/08/10 Leave a comment

Good critical comments by Banerjee and Skuterud regarding possible abuse and the ongoing favouring of reduced labour costs to employers. That being said, for repeat users, simplification has merit but as in so many areas of immigration policy, these change fail to address the immigration-related challenges of housing, healthcare and infrastructure:

The federal government is making it easier for businesses to bring temporary foreign workers into Canada, announcing a new “recognized employer” program aimed at speeding up the approval process for companies with a track record of using foreign labour.

The three-year pilot program is designed to reduce the amount of paperwork companies need to submit to justify bringing in outside workers.

It’s the latest expansion of the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program, whose use has exploded over the past year as the federal government has eased restrictions on short-term foreign labour. And it comes alongside a record surge in immigration, which is increasing the country’s labour supply but also adding demand to Canada’s overheated housing market and public services.

Randy Boissonnault, the new Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages, said the change to the TFW program would “cut red tape” and help companies manage widespread labour shortages.

The move was applauded by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which has long lobbied for a trusted employer carveout in the TFW program.

Some labour economists, however, warned that further expansion of the program could undercut wages in Canada and make it more difficult to identify companies that are exploiting vulnerable workers.

“It could be a good thing for addressing kinds of critical labour shortages,” said Rupa Banerjee, the Canada Research Chair in economic inclusion, employment and entrepreneurship of Canada’s immigrants at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“But if this kind of a system is not really closely monitored, scrutinized, audited, it’s easy for sort of mundane and everyday examples of abuse and exploitation to kind of become even more rampant in the system,” she said.

As it stands, companies need to submit a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) before applying to hire temporary foreign workers. The purpose of the LMIA is to show that there are no Canadians or permanent residents who are able to fill the job.

Under the new system, employers who can demonstrate “a history of complying with program requirements” will be given a three-year approval to bring in temporary foreign workers, and won’t have to submit an LMIA before each application. Eligible employers will need to have had three successful LMIAs in the past five years for workers who are deemed to be “in-shortage,” and will be subject to a “more rigorous upfront assessment,” the government said in a news release.

The pilot program will be open to agriculture businesses in September and employers from all other industries starting in January.

This is the second notable change to the TFW program in just over a year. Last spring, the federal government said companies could hire up to 20 per cent of their staff through the program’s low-wage stream, up from the previous 10-per-cent cap. And in seven industries with acute labour shortages – such as restaurants, construction and hospitals – the cap was moved to 30 per cent for a year, then extended to this fall.

The TFW program is largely used as a recruitment tool for farm workers. During the first quarter of this year, employers were approved to hire more than 25,000 workers through agriculture streams, according to figures published by Employment and Social Development Canada, which decides on LMIA applications. General farm workers are easily the most sought-after role in the TFW program, with more than 22,000 approved positions in the first quarter.

But as Ottawa has eased access to foreign labour, employers have ramped up their recruitment of low-wage employees from abroad. Companies were approved to fill about 22,000 roles through the program’s low-wage stream in the first quarter, an increase of about 275 per cent from four years earlier. Cooks are the No. 2 occupation of highest demand, with nearly 3,000 positions approved from January through March. Truck drivers, food counter attendants and seafood plant workers are also in high demand.

Diana Palmerin-Velasco, senior director of the future of work at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, welcomed the announcement and said it could improve access to the TFW program for smaller employers.

“There are whole sectors of the economy that are dependent on temporary foreign workers,” Ms. Palmerin-Velasco said. “What we have heard from our members is that it’s not that easy for employers. There is a lot of administrative burden, it can be a very complex application process. And when we think about small businesses, it’s not really accessible.”

Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo, questioned the government’s rationale for expanding the program. The Canadian labour market has been exceptionally tight over the past year-and-a-half, as demand for workers has outstripped supply. However, in recent months, job vacancies have been trending down and the unemployment rate has risen.

“We’ve had a 25-per-cent reduction in job vacancies since May, 2022, and if you measure labour market tightness, that’s also been dropping,” Prof. Skuterud said.

He added that recent research into temporary foreign workers suggests that they tend to suppress wage growth within companies that use them. “And so we’re going through a period where real wages for low skilled workers in this country are not increasing. The most recent data looks like they’re decreasing. And so it’s all about where this government’s priorities are,” he said.

Source: New temporary foreign worker pilot program to speed up approvals for some employers

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William Watson: In 2023 is it possible to have a reasoned discussion of immigration?

2023/08/09 Leave a comment

Good commentary, but ducking the numbers question:

Marc Miller just finished five years as a federal minister working on Indigenous issues. Now, ironically, he’s minister of immigration, encouraging an influx of new Canadians many Indigenous Canadians think hasn’t served them so well.

He’s better off than the person he’s replacing, however, rising Liberal star Sean Fraser. After 21 months at immigration, Fraser is off to housing, infrastructure and communities to work on the big headaches caused for, ahem, housing, infrastructure and communities by the record number of immigrants he let in. It’s just desserts of a sort you don’t often see in politics — even if the prime minister’s recent disavowal of federal responsibility for housing, motivated more by hot-potato politics than respectful regard for the constitutional division of powers, may let Fraser off the sharpest of those three hooks.

Minister Miller says he’ll listen to arguments about whether current immigration targets are correct. The official target has been bumped up to 500,000 a year from 400,000, though in 2022 we hit 1.2 million — the only target Ottawa has bested in recent years.

But the minister will only listen so much. Attack lines are at the ready. As he said shortly after taking his new office: “In every wave of migration that Canada has had, there has been a segment of folks that have blamed immigrants for taking houses, taking jobs, you name it. Those are people that don’t necessarily have the best interest of immigrants at heart and we have to call that out when we see it and we won’t hesitate to do that.” No one who has watched the prime minister drive wedge after wedge into Canadian policy debates over the last eight years has the slightest doubt the Liberals will do that. People who would like to debate the immigration targets may well be anti-immigrant, Miller’s statement suggests, which is but one step of slippery logic away from the R-word: racis

In this day and age, of course, we never actually discuss a policy issue: we look for the slightest doctrinal misstep in our ideological adversaries’ arguments and pounce, self-righteously claiming the moral high ground while accusing our opponents of having fallen into an ethical ditch.

Immigration seems an area where informed and informative debate will be especially difficult. So kudos to TD Economics for recently issuing a short study of the issue: “Balancing Canada’s pop in population,” by Beata Caranci, James Orlando and Rishi Sondhi. At a time when big banks seem to specialize in serving up politically correct pablum, this piece raises hard questions about how desirable a big boost in immigration is.

Nobody opposes some level of immigration. The question is: how much? In theory, there is an optimal level where the benefits brought by the next new member of our society just offset the costs he or she imposes. In theory, both short-run and long-run costs and benefits can be considered. In theory, they can even be discounted by an appropriate interest rate. Policy should hit that sweet spot and not go beyond it.

In practice, the optimal level is very hard to calculate. People will disagree — perfectly reasonably — on what, and how big, the benefits and costs are, how they may change as more people come, and what the discount rate should be. (Do you know what interest rates will be 10 years from now?) On the whole, I think the TD Economics folks are too optimistic about our ability to discover this right “balance,” but they do us all a great service by describing some of the costs of high rates of immigration.

For instance, if the inflow stays high, we may need 500,000 more housing units (i.e., homes) over the next two years — which seems a task well beyond the capacity of our politico/builders/planners complex. As for health care, the OECD ranked us 31st among 34 member-countries in acute care hospital beds per capita in 2019 — and we’re rapidly raising the number of our capitas without commensurate increases in beds.

There’s also some doubt as to whether immigration is serving the econo-strategic purpose governments have laid out for it, which is to provide young, skilled and therefore high-earning labour that can pay enough taxes to finance the health care and retirement incomes of us older folk. But 40 per cent of people in the rapidly expanding temporary foreign worker program work in agriculture, forestry and fishing, and another 15 per cent in accommodation and food. Those are important jobs which, increasingly, people born here won’t do. But they aren’t the tax bonanzas we locals are looking for.

Immigration may even raise interest rates. Eventually it increases the economy’s capacity but in the short run it boosts demand, which is the last thing we need as we fight inflation. To make sure that doesn’t get out of control, the Bank of Canada may have to keep interest rates 50 basis points higher than if immigration rates were lower. Which hardly helps us build new housing or infrastructure.

Every one of those points is debatable, of course. So let’s have the debate. And don’t anyone use the R-word.

Source: William Watson: In 2023 is it possible to have a reasoned discussion of immigration?

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Canada’s visa officers abroad to get anti-racism training amid allegations of discrimination

2023/08/09 Leave a comment

Look forward to seeing evaluations and whether or not a change in the public service employee survey occurs. Interesting, but not surprising, that Conservative immigration critic raised the issue as part of the apparent overall strategy of focussing on the administration of the immigration program:

Staff working in Canada’s visa posts abroad are to be given anti-racism training amid concerns that some local employees hired by the federal government are discriminating against Black people and members of other minorities and religious groups applying to come to this country

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says staff processing visa applications in embassies and high commissions around the world will need to take anti-racism and diversity courses, as members of Parliament continue to raise the alarm that local employees’ personal prejudices may be influencing Canadian visa decisions.

As part of an initiative unfolding globally, IRCC told The Globe and Mail that in April this year it started requiring its employees in Canada’s High Commission in South Africa – including local staff employed to process Canadian visa and permanent residence applications – to take anti-racism and diversity training.

MPs have highlighted complaints from immigration consultants and applicants that South African IRCC employees processing visas in Pretoria may be discriminating against non-white applicants who want to visit and live in Canada.

One Canadian immigration consultant with clients living in South Africa told The Globe that in their experience, Black applicants – particularly Black women – faced higher refusal rates, and more questions and obstacles and delays than white clients. The Globe is not identifying the individual because they feared it would lead to their clients being discriminated against.

They said white South African staff in Canada’s Pretoria visa office tended to be quick to approve applications from white people wanting to come to Canada and often gave them a chance to correct files with errors in them. He said files of his Black applicants with any mistakes tended to face higher rates of rejection.

The consultant said applications they had made on behalf of non-white clients had a 50/50 chance of approval, with local staff looking for any reason to refuse them.

Conservative immigration critic Tom Kmiec said local prejudices were not just a problem in sub-Saharan Africa but in locally staffed visa sections of embassies in Turkey and the Middle East.

He said Ottawa should consider sending Canadian staff on rotation to work in visa posts abroad to replace local staff, or send the completed digital applications to Canada for final decisions to ensure fairness.

Canadian visa offices based in embassies and high commissions abroad run by the Immigration Department (IRCC), employ both Canadian and local staff. Canadian immigration officials oversee local employees and decision-making, but day-to-day processing of applications for those wanting to come to Canada is often done by staff from the country where the visa office is based.

Mr. Kmiec said he had seen cases from Turkey and the Middle East of minorities, including Kurds, Armenians, Chaldean Christians, Druze and Zoroastrians, facing steep refusal rates and a higher bar than other applicants.

“I have heard stories upon stories from people being denied visa applications – some of them are mortifying stories of people being denied visa applications where it was very evident they should get them,” he said. “Some of the rejections were very quick, like they barely had time to consider the applications. The department has a problem with racism both on the staff level and towards applicants as well.”

The Canadian immigration consultant also gave examples of non-white clients living in South Africa, but originating from other countries, who faced obstacles in Pretoria – including highly qualified professionals with jobs in Canada.

The consultant believed Canada had delegated visa decision-making authority to local white South Africans who had been in the visa section for too long. They said only Canadians should be signing off on visas in Pretoria.

Toronto MP Kevin Vuong, who has been highlighting immigration issues including homeless asylum seekers camping on the street in his constituency, has raised the issue of South Africa’s visa section three times in Parliament, and says he plans to continue pursuing it.

He said that among the non-white applicants who faced holdups by local staff in Pretoria was a surgeon with a job in Canada who had been vetted and approved by a Canadian health authority.

“This is unconscionable. Canadians are proud of our history of helping to end apartheid, we must ensure we live up to that legacy and our aspiration to be a truly inclusive country,” he said.

The House of Commons immigration committee highlighted examples of unfairness in immigration decisions in a report last year. In its response earlier this year, the IRCC said it needs to address “embedded systemic racism and other inequities within the Canadian immigration system.” It said its anti-racism strategy addresses unconscious bias and discrimination in decision making.

“The department agrees in principle that concrete steps need to be undertaken to increase diversity amongst locally engaged staff,” the IRCC response said.

The IRCC told The Globe in a statement that it upholds the “same standards and values of anti-racism, whether we are Canadians or locally hired staff” and anti-racism (AR) and diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) training was held in Pretoria in April, 2023 “as part of IRCC’s anti-racism commitments.”

“As part of our anti-racism work, we also identify and address any sources of bias that might create barriers or unfairness in our procedures and processes,” it said, adding: “All overseas offices will be engaging in AR and DEI training.”

Source: Canada’s visa officers abroad to get anti-racism training amid allegations of discrimination

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Myles: Le débat reste à faire

2023/08/08 Leave a comment

Good column noting the need for a discussion on immigration levels and their impact on housing etc. And that it is encouraging that this debate is possible without falling into xenophobic tropes:

D’abord confinée aux marges du débat politique, la décision unilatérale du gouvernement Trudeau d’accueillir 500 000 immigrants par année commence enfin à soulever des questions pressantes.

Depuis quelques semaines, les médias du Canada anglais se questionnent sur les capacités d’accueil du Canada. C’est tout un contraste avec la situation qui prévalait l’automne dernier, lorsque le premier ministre, Justin Trudeau, a annoncé son intention d’ouvrir les vannes à l’immigration à compter de 2025. Les premiers ministres des provinces, préoccupés par le vieillissement de la population et la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre, n’avaient rien trouvé à redire. Seul le premier ministre du Québec, François Legault, s’était inscrit en faux contre cette politique fédérale qui aurait mérité un débat public beaucoup plus exhaustif compte tenu de son ampleur.

Dans un entretien à La Presse, le chef du Bloc québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, a pris un malin plaisir à souligner ce revirement. En mai, le Bloc a présenté une motion critique des cibles en raison de leur impact sur le poids du français, le logement et les services publics déjà exsangues. Malgré l’appui des conservateurs, la motion a été rejetée sans ménagement par le couple libéral-néodémocrate. « Ce débat en soi est une excellente nouvelle. Jusqu’à tout récemment, c’était facile. On disait que les Québécois étaient des racistes, contre l’immigration, et que le Canada était un gentil pays d’accueil multiculturaliste. C’était simple de même », a ironisé M. Blanchet.

Mais voilà que la coupe est pleine avant même d’avoir enclenché la marche vers l’accueil d’un demi-million d’immigrants par année. La crise du logement, largement documentée dans Le Devoir, s’empare de toutes les grandes villes et même des villes intermédiaires du pays. À Toronto, la nouvelle mairesse, Olivia Chow, a lancé un cri d’alarme sitôt entrée en fonction. Il n’y a plus de place pour loger les migrants, à telle enseigne qu’ils occupent près du tiers des lits dans les refuges pour sans-abri.

La pénurie de logements est sans contredit le principal écueil de la politique fédérale, mais il y en a d’autres. Dans un rapport récent, la Banque TD prédit que la forte hausse de l’immigration entraînera un manque à gagner de 500 000 logements dès 2025, en plus d’exercer une pression sur les taux d’intérêt, la prestation des services publics et les infrastructures. Le Canada se classe au 31e rang sur 34 pour le nombre de lits d’hôpital par habitant en soins de courte durée. Rien ne laisse présager qu’une amélioration du bilan est à l’horizon.

Voilà donc une occasion inespérée de débattre des capacités d’accueil du Canada sans se faire taxer de sombres desseins ou de xénophobie rampante. Ce pays, de même que le Québec, est promis à des défis considérables. Au Canada, près de 19,5 % de la population a 65 ans et plus, comparativement à 20,5 % au Québec. En 2030, la cohorte des 65 ans et plus passera à 23 % de la population au Canada et à 25 % au Québec.

L’immigration n’est pourtant pas une panacée. Chiffres à l’appui, notre chroniqueur Gérard Bérubé expliquait récemment que « l’immigration débridée n’est qu’un remède temporaire à la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre et qu’un contre-pied parmi d’autres au vieillissement de la population ».

La politique libérale masque un problème de fond. La croissance de la population dope le PIB en général, mais si on s’attarde au PIB réel par habitant, qui permet de mesurer le niveau de vie, le Canada arrive dernier parmi les membres de l’Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques (OCDE). La productivité, sujet tabou s’il en est, n’est tout simplement pas au rendez-vous depuis 2014. Sans un redressement de cet indicateur, nous ne pourrons espérer que le bien-être économique des Canadiens s’améliorera par une stratégie misant sur la croissance démographique.

Bien sûr, l’immigration est un apport considérable pour la diversité et la vitalité du Canada et du Québec. Les sociétés monolithiques, réelles ou fantasmées, qui sont basées sur la recherche de mythes fondateurs et de valeurs consensuelles, offrent un spectacle d’une plate grisaille.

Il faut avoir la force de débattre des seuils d’immigration, sereinement, et demander au gouvernement fédéral de refaire ses calculs en fonction des capacités réelles d’accueil, et non des promesses électoralistes qui ont peu de chance de se matérialiser en matière de bonification de l’offre de logements et d’amélioration des services publics.

Pour le Québec, le défi est double. Il faut miser sur des politiques et des leviers d’intégration des nouveaux arrivants au fait français, en leur tendant la main au lieu de les stigmatiser. Et trouver une façon de préserver le poids démographique du Québec dans la Confédération sans le déposséder de ses attributs de gardien du fait français en terre d’Amérique. Les deux objectifs sont compatibles, mais ils n’en demeurent pas moins difficiles à atteindre dans un contexte d’immigration effrénée.

Source: Le débat reste à faire

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‘Need too great’: Canada could raise immigration targets despite housing crunch

2023/08/05 Leave a comment

Change in Minister doesn’t mean a change in policy or understanding as government continues to ignore the linkage between housing, healthcare and infrastructure with immigration. Disappointing, as a change in minister provided an opportunity to signal recognition of this linkage and the negative impacts:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government won’t lower its immigration targets despite growing criticism that drastic population growth worsens existing housing shortages.

In one of his first interviews a week into his new cabinet role, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said the government will have to either keep — or raise — its annual targets for permanent residents of about half a million. That’s because of the diminishing number of working-age people relative to the number of retirees and the risk it poses to public service funding, he said.
“I don’t see a world in which we lower it, the need is too great,” said Miller, who’s expected to announce new targets on Nov. 1. “Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at. But certainly I don’t think we’re in any position of wanting to lower them by any stretch of the imagination.”Globally, advanced economies are confronting similar challenges from decreasing birthrates and aging workforces, and many are competing for skilled workers. But while immigration for some countries is a divisive issue that can polarize voters and even topple a government, Canada has comfortably relied on public support to open its doors more widely for working-age newcomers.Miller’s comments suggest the government is still counting on that backing to grow its population rapidly to stave off long-term economic decline. Trudeau’s government has consistently raised its target for permanent residents. Last year, foreign students, temporary workers and refugees made up another group that’s even larger, bringing total arrivals to a record one million.

Source: ‘Need too great’: Canada could raise immigration targets despite housing crunch

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Poilievre says Canada’s immigration system is broken, sidesteps target cut questions

2023/08/05 Leave a comment

Not surprising that he ducked the levels question as he would be tarred as xenophobic. But his relentless focus on housing, and the increased discussion on the link between high levels of immigration and housing availability and affordability, are increasingly untenable.

Suspect if he had the political courage to advocate for a pause at current levels to allow housing and healthcare to start catching up (or not falling further behind), he might gain some political support in both immigrant and non-immigrant communities.

But I’m not a political strategist!

Canada’s immigration system is broken, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre charged Tuesday, as he sidestepped questions about whether he would change current targets.

Appearing before reporters on Parliament Hill, Poilievre criticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent comments on housing and pledged to speed up entry for immigrants skilled in the building trades.

The federal government has set a target of welcoming 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025, although some worry about the pressure that could add to the country’s housing crisis, driven by what experts agree is a supply shortage.

Ottawa has defended its ambitious target as necessary given the labour shortage and thousands of job vacancies that employers continue to experience since the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered widespread lockdowns.

Poilievre slammed the Liberal target as driven by Trudeau’s “ideology,” but he did not answer repeated questions about whether he would consider reducing the number.

He said a Conservative government would base its immigration policy on the needs of private-sector employers, the degree to which charities plan to support refugees and the desire for family reunification.

“I’ll make sure we have housing and health care so that when people come here they have a roof overhead and care when they need it,” he said Tuesday.

“I’ll make sure that it’s easier for employers to fill genuine job vacancies they cannot fill.”

Statistics Canada reported last month the country is facing a little more than 781,000 job vacancies.

Poilievre’s comments come as the Conservatives try to increase their support in newcomer communities in some of the country’s largest cities and suburbs, selling the party as pro-immigration.

The Tories have struggled to rebuild such support since losing government in 2015, when they campaigned on a pledge to set up a tip line for so-called “barbaric cultural practices.”

A review of the party’s 2021 election loss called for recruitment of more diverse candidates and better outreach to cultural communities.

Besides appearing at numerous ethnic media roundtables, attending different cultural events and meeting with various business groups, Poilievre has championed cost-of-living issues in his outreach, from a lack of affordable housing to high food prices.

Rather than discussing immigration targets, the Conservative leader has focused on the system’s shortcomings.

His opponents, however, have been carefully watching his position. The federal NDP attacked Poilievre back in May for supporting a Bloc Québécois motion that condemned the government’s immigration goals for not properly considering their impact on the French language in Quebec, as well as housing, schools and health-care.

In his outreach, Poilievre has also honed in on concerns about the number of international students to die by suicide since the pandemic, with more relying on food banks.

He has promised to speed up licensing processes for doctors and nurses who come to Canada, saying Tuesday the Conservatives would ensure “that immigrants who come here as professionals get a chance to work in their profession.”

He also took aim at new Housing Minister Sean Fraser, who served in the immigration portfolio before the recent cabinet shuffle.

Calling Fraser “the worst immigration minister in Canadian history,” Poilievre blamed him and Trudeau for refugee claimants sleeping on Toronto’s streets due to a lack of spaces in the city’s shelter system.

The federal government recently announced it would give the city almost $100 million to help find housing.

Source: Poilievre says Canada’s immigration system is broken, sidesteps target cut questions

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Cuenco: Trudeau’s cynical immigration racket

2023/08/05 Leave a comment

Bit of a rant with some valid critiques of both major political parties and the institutions and people that support them:

When Canada’s population hit the 40 million mark earlier this summer, it was celebrated as a milestoneand a “signal that Canada remains a dynamic and welcoming country”, in the words of the country’s chief statistician. The Washington Post, among other foreign observers, cited this as evidence that “Canada is booming like it never has before”. It failed to mention, however, the recent closure of Roxham Road on the New York-Quebec border, an entry point for many thousands of irregular refugee border crossings since 2017.

These two policies — the population-growth plan and the border-crossing closure — may seem antithetical, but they are very much related. Together, they illustrate Ottawa’s distinctive approach to immigration. Notwithstanding the progressive rhetoric of its leaders, Canada has actually been quite proactive at restricting most uncontrolled migration through its “bureaucratic wall”, while ensuring through a highly selective strategy (which includes the lauded “points system”) that the majority of the newcomers who do arrive through controlled channels are, relatively speaking, well-off, well-educated and hailing from middle-class backgrounds.

In this way, Canada has been able to scoop up “the best and the brightest” from all over the world, which explains why immigration has historically always been a popular policy. In fact, this arrangement has been so politically stable that a viable anti-immigration party has yet to emerge at the national level, bucking the trend in other Western democracies.

Yet there are reasons to believe that a reckoning is in store — though not because Canadians’ cultural attitudes to immigrants have soured, as has happened in most European nations. Indeed, they are more likely to think of surgeons rather than Salafists when they look at who’s coming through their migration streams. If a countermovement against the status quo is to come, it will stem from a single factor: there will be nowhere for newcomers to live.

This may sound like a strange thing to say for the world’s second largest country by landmass, but most Canadians live in a handful of cities and, amid a global housing crisis, Canada ranks as among the absolute worst nations in the developed world for affordability. It has the highest household debt and, astonishingly, the lowest number of housing units per 1,000 people in the G7. Needless to say, the housing bubble has greatly reduced Canadians’ quality of life and made already pricey metropolises such as Toronto and Vancouver impossible to live in for those who are not already solidly affluent. And it shows: homelessness has exploded and sprawling tent cities are now a distressingly common sight. With circumstances as dire as this, how did policymakers in Ottawa figure it would be a good idea to welcome 1.5 million new residents by 2025?

A big part of the answer is that it’s all going according to plan. For the main overriding (if unsayable) goal of Canadian policymaking across all levels of government is to do everything possible to boost real estate values and rental prices rapidly and radically for the benefit of established homeowners and investors — and to the detriment of everyone else.

This cleavage, a primarily economic rather than a cultural or identitarian one, pits older home-owning Canadians from the Boomer and Gen X cohorts against struggling Millennials and Gen Zs; landlords against renters; long-settled immigrants against those fresh-off-the-boat: in other words, the insiders against the outsiders.

And it is clear where the loyalties of Canada’s political classes lay. The Nimby orthodoxy favoured by the insiders is evident in everything from steep development charges baked into municipal regulations — which make the cost of building houses prohibitive — to lazy, sticking-plaster solutions such as rent relief schemes, which simply funnel money into landlords’ pockets while doing nothing to address the underlying problems of housing undersupply. Once viewed in relation to this out-in-the-open conspiracy — the Great Canadian Racket — the government’s immigration targets, as well as its student visa policy, start to make sense.

For this purpose, Canada specifically wants prospective immigrants who are financially endowed, not penniless refugees; and it is able to draw in those candidates through its selective policy controls, whether they’re coming in as immigrants or as international students with enough funds to cover exorbitant rents and tuition fees.

The plight of international students is particularly tragic. Bright-eyed applicants to Canadian institutions from India and elsewhere are lured in with promises of a first-world education, only to be suckered into overpriced degrees while being cooped into horrendous housing conditions and forced to compete for menial gig work. Though Canada is not alone in experiencing this kind of steady glut of foreign entrants to its universities, it’s been conspicuous in its refusal to consider the extent of the exploitation involved — unlike in Britain, for instance, where authorities seem at least to have acknowledged the issue. While Canada has set about poaching high-skilled foreign workers from the US, a Toronto international student was found living under a bridge. Ottawa’s response to this and other horror stories seems to be: come on in!

This careless approach of importing boatloads of wealth-bearing immigrants to juice up the economic growth numbers, driving up rents for everyone and lowering the cost of labour, has been referred to by one housing policy commentator as “human quantitative easing”, an appropriately Orwellian-sounding name. Canada’s embrace of it has led to a perverse contradiction whereby its official monetary policy — namely, successive rate hikes to tame inflation (meaning increasingly costly mortgage payments for new homeowners) — is being offset by its unofficial “Human QE” policy, which, of course, exerts an inflationary effect.

If there is one ray of hope, it is that the immigrants and students themselves are beginning to rise up. Because of the genteel, middle-class character of many of these newcomers, they often have amour-propre — a keen sense of one’s own worth. The words of a Punjabi architect who decided to move back home are emblematic: “I respect myself too much to stay [in Canada].”

The ruling Liberals have all but abdicated moral responsibility on the issue, with Trudeau going from lofty rhetoric about “housing is a human right” to declaring that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility”. And though carrying a kernel of truth at an abstract, technical level, his words nonetheless struck many as offensively tone-deaf. After all, Trudeau’s willingness to confront the provinces on issues such as carbon pricing merely highlights his studied indifference on housing.

This negligent stance is reinforced by members of the government caucus, such as ex-housing minister, Ahmed Hussen, who recently insisted that housing “is not a political issue” after purchasing his second rental unit; and Vancouver MP Taleeb Noormohamed, who made millions buying and flipping houses. In any event, the Trudeau Liberals are cruising towards a well-earned defeat at the polls.

The bad news for Canadians is that the alternative, the Conservative Party of Pierre Poilievre, is no better. Much like Hussen and Noormohamed, Poilievre is a card-carrying member of the investor-rentier oligarchy (private investment is, of course, key to funding more construction but this class has gone about it in all the wrong ways, presiding over the hyper-financialisation of new and existing supply). The Conservative “plan” is apparently based on pushing cities to build more homes with carrots and sticks; and though phrased in colourful populist language (“Fire the gatekeepers!”), it is essentially a weak mirror image of Trudeau’s feckless initiatives. Poilievre’s bluster about fining cities that fail to comply — which Ottawa may not even have the power to do — would almost certainly just result in municipalities retaliating by jacking up fees and charges even more to pay the new fines.

Furthermore, Poilievre shows no sign of breaking with the status quo on immigration, refusing to contradictTrudeau’s immigration targets. There are two possible reasons for this, both of which could be true. The first is that Poilievre fears being tarred as “Trump North” and doesn’t want to risk losing the Conservatives’ long-cultivated relationship with multicultural communities (the subject of an admiring 2014 essayby Rishi Sunak) — even though the young people in those same communities are suffering just as much from housing scarcity and would greatly benefit from a slowdown in the rate of new arrivals. The second is that Poilievre is an anti-statist libertarian who worships at the altar of Milton Friedman, the US monetarist who helped make the case for immigration maximalism, when he argued it would supercharge growth and kill the welfare state. It could just be that Poilievre genuinely believes, on ideological grounds, that such heedless immigration targets are a good idea.

Canada faces a perfect storm: a population bomb and a housing crunch, both the consciously engineered products of national policy. Staving off disaster will require heroic leadership to chart needed course corrections on housing, immigration and student visas, while acknowledging the hard political trade-offs that need to happen: the insiders must incorporate the interests and demands of the outsiders, or trigger a complete social breakdown. In the past, Canada’s storied Laurentian elite excelled at this kind of astute brokerage politics and built a nation with it, but their courage and vision have now given way to the reign of cowardice and mediocrity.

Source: Trudeau’s cynical immigration racket

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What I wish someone told me about working in Canada when I first immigrated

2023/08/03 Leave a comment

Good practical advice:

When you’re a new immigrant to Canada and entering the corporate workforce, you need to strike a fine balance. You need to believe in your value and in what you bring to the table, but also work to integrate into a whole new culture in which the learning curve can be steep. In the decades since I began that journey myself, I’ve gained a number of insights I wish someone had told me when I first arrived. I’ve also learned what some of the obstacles are that hinder growth and how to overcome those hurdles.

Obstacles that hinder growth

Communication styles may not be what you’re used to

I once had a manager who was a senior vice-president and managed more than nine nationalities. He said he initially tried the Canadian approach in other places he worked, but quickly discovered that each group wanted to be spoken to in a certain way. The British wanted things non-emotional while the Spanish were the opposite: he had to show he cared. French people wanted to start with an argument. He had to develop a playbook for speaking to groups from each nationality. But not every manager will have this skill level, so you may need to adapt.

In Canada, people often take a softer approach to communication than in some places. Feedback is often sandwiched – a positive, a negative, then another positive. If you don’t understand what a person means, be straightforward and ask direct questions. Don’t just let your imagination fill in the blanks. Also, be curious. Take the time to learn about what’s considered rude, passive-aggressive and so on, to prevent possible missteps.

Canadian corporations operate with flatter hierarchies than in some places

While there is hierarchy in the corporate structure, it’s not exercised the same way you may be accustomed to. I have seen examples of people who come from cultures in which having a title means they expect to be trusted blindly and to be treated like the boss. That’s acceptable in some cultures, but it doesn’t work that way in Canada. Leaders and managers are often less autocratic. This can play in your favour, in the sense that if you’re adaptable, you can gain advantage in a flatter structure that generally has decent respect for workers. However, if your mindset is stuck and you come from a place of entitlement or thinking that people owe you something, it will backfire.

One major difficulty can be feeling undervalued

Employers are often proud of being Canadian, and it can make employees, potential hires and even students feel that others are not good enough. Despite Canada’s messages about welcoming immigrants and valuing diversity, there is a difference between that initial PR machine and the on-the-ground experience, where people may make you feel like you don’t have the right accent or sufficient Canadian work experience.

And let’s be real – you may be subjected to discrimination, bias and racism. I myself have been isolated and bullied, and I’ve faced language barriers as a francophone; even after all these years, my mind works differently than those whose first language is English.

These factors can hinder your growth.

Tips to thrive

Networking is key

If you come here as an adult, you may not have school or university networks or friend circles. Join organizations, attend events and seek out networks to join. Find mentors and people who can guide and support you. Doing this, and finding the right mentor, can give you a real boost. Canada is a place where, overall, people take a favourable view of immigration and where there are many opportunities, but it’s important to be proactive.

Learn about your host country

Of course, you both should be learning about each other, but as an immigrant, you should take the lead. Learn about Canada’s customs and traditions. Don’t stay within your community exclusively – expand and meet others, including people who aren’t like you. It may be worth investing some time and money into additional formal education, too. It might not be easy, but it’s worth the effort, both for the diploma and for the connections you make while you’re doing it.

That being said, when you’re an immigrant, it’s not about becoming a different person.

Remember your value

You’re willing to face risk – or you wouldn’t be here. Keep that bravery, that sense of risk-taking. You may need to work harder or prove yourself more, and without drawing on that strength, you may quickly become disgruntled.

Be confident that you add value. Don’t come at it from the perspective of begging. If you’re here, it means you are adding value to this country. You add diversity to the table and it’s important. Celebrate your difference and see it as the positive that it is.

Finally, be willing to help other immigrants with the things you learn along the way. That, too, is an added value you can bring to Canada thanks to your own perspective and insights. Entering the workforce as an immigrant can be tough, but you’re tougher.

Karima-Catherine Goundiam is the founder and chief executive officer of digital strategy firm Red Dot Digital and business matchmaking platform B2BeeMatch.

Source: What I wish someone told me about working in Canada when I first immigrated

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Sun Editorial: Trudeau’s responsible for housing policy

2023/08/03 Leave a comment

Seems like Postmedia on a roll with this linkage:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claiming housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility flies in the face of everything he’s said about the issue since coming to power in 2015.

Seriously, what is he thinking?

Appearing in Hamilton on Monday to announce four affordable housing projects creating 214 new units, to which federal taxpayers contributed $45 million, Trudeau said: “I’ll be blunt as well. Housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility. It’s not something that we have direct carriage of. But it is something that we can and must help with.”

He blamed the previous Stephen Harper government for abandoning housing policy, accusing Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre of being a party to that decision.

He also said the Ontario government should be doing more.

We agree with Trudeau that all levels of government have a part to play in the issue of housing supply, but for him to claim affordable housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility, undermined his own message that, “of all the cost-of-living challenges … housing is the most expensive thing.”

If that’s true, given everything Trudeau has said about the importance of affordable housing since he came to power in 2015, it had better be a primary responsibility for him.

As for Trudeau not having “direct carriage” of the issue, he has direct carriage of immigration, where he’s rapidly increasing the level to 1.45 million new arrivals between 2023 and 2025, contributing to the surge in demand and higher costs for housing nationally.

Trudeau knows this. As he said Monday: “Right now we’re facing a real challenge around housing in terms of supply. There’s simply not enough places for people to live.”

On the campaign trail in 2015, Trudeau promised a “comprehensive National Housing Strategy” to “make housing more affordable for those who need it most – seniors, persons with disabilities, lower-income families and Canadians working hard to join the middle class.”

As of March, 2023, according to the feds, taxpayers have committed $33.69 billion to Trudeau’s national housing strategy, which will top out at over $82 billion in March, 2028.

Trudeau says this has helped almost two million families and individuals get the housing they need.

If he’s going to claim successes in federal housing policy, he has to account for its shortcomings as well.

Source: EDITORIAL: Trudeau’s responsible for housing policy

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ICYMI: Ottawa to focus on tech-related immigration despite industry headwinds

2023/08/02 Leave a comment

Some good notes of caution by Statistics Canada experts and UBC’s David Green:

The federal government is upending its points-based system for immigrant selection this year and prioritizing candidates with experience in the technology sector, despite recent layoffs and weakening labour demand in the industry.

Since June 28, Ottawa has invited people with particular attributes to apply for permanent residency (PR), a departure from how the Express Entry system, which accounts for a large portion of economic immigration to Canada, usually works.

Candidates in that pool are assigned a score – based on such factors as age and education – and the government regularly selects those with the highest scores to apply for PR status.

Under the new approach, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is frequently sending out invitations to apply to a subset of individuals. This year, IRCC will focus on people with French-language skills or recent work experience in one of five fields, including STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and health care.

Sean Fraser, who until recently was immigration minister, said category-based selection would help Canada to bring in health care and construction workers that it desperately needs in ailing sectors of the economy.

“Realistically, we need to leverage the new flexibilities that will kick in in 2023 to do targeted draws for people who have the skills to build more houses,” he said at a press conference last November.

But the federal government will put considerably more emphasis on the recruitment of STEM workers, according to targets that IRCC shared with The Globe and Mail.

Between 28 per cent and 31 per cent of PR invitations that are issued through the Express Entry system this year will go to people with recent experience in certain STEM jobs, such as data scientists and software developers. Most applications are processed within six months of being received.

This easily exceeds the target ranges for candidates with French-language proficiency (11 per cent to 15 per cent) or those with experience in specific occupations within health care (nine per cent to 12 per cent), trades (three per cent to four per cent), transportation and agriculture (one per cent to two per cent each).

The emphasis on tech-savvy immigrants is part of a broader recruiting strategy that’s taken shape in recent weeks. This month, for example, the federal government invited skilled workers with H-1B visas in the United States to apply for Canadian work permits, hitting its cap of 10,000 applications within 48 hours of the initiative’s launch.

But this push also coincides with a challenging time for the tech sector, which has endured a series of high-profile layoffs over the past year, including two rounds of sweeping cuts at Shopify Inc.Tech-related job growth has slowed dramatically this year, while postings for some roles have plunged to below pre-pandemic levels.

There’s been “a huge shift in the job market when it comes to recruiting activity and hiring appetite,” said Brendon Bernard, senior economist at hiring site Indeed Canada.

Economists and policy experts have warned that Canada has a checkered history in matching immigrants to specific jobs.

Just under 50 per cent of STEM-educated adult immigrants in the U.S. and Canada worked a STEM job in the mid-2010s, according to a report that Statistics Canada published in 2020.

Of the remaining STEM-educated immigrants, about 50 per cent in the U.S. found a job that required a university degree, while in Canada, just 20 per cent did. “In Canada, most STEM-educated immigrants who could not find employment in a STEM occupation found lower-skilled jobs,” Garnett Picot and Feng Hou wrote in the report.

The authors noted that Canada experienced a rush of STEM-educated immigrants in the 1990s, in response to the ill-fated dot-com boom, and their ranks “have remained at high levels” ever since. “In the absence of a shortage of STEM workers, employers may prefer to hire those educated in Western countries,” the report said.

Tech companies, on the other hand, frequently say that Canada suffers from a shortage of skilled workers, making it tough to compete globally.

To date, IRCC has invited 8,600 people to apply for permanent residency over five rounds of category-based selections. There has been one round of STEM invites that went to 500 people.

IRCC will continue to select people from the broad pool of Express Entry candidates, not just those with specific attributes; if a STEM worker receives a PR invite in this manner, it counts toward the target for that category. And depending on a person’s attributes – say, a French-speaking engineer – they can be counted in multiple categories.

The Immigration Department developed its list of desired occupations after a public consultation that drew 289 responses from various stakeholders, including Amazon and the Council of Canadian Innovators, a lobby group for prominent tech companies. The categories are in place for 2023 and subject to change thereafter.

The Express Entry system is being shaken up in the process. By filtering for specific job experience, the government is reaching deeper into the pool of candidates, which means that some high-scoring candidates will get passed over. (The scores correspond to their expected earnings in Canada, based on the outcomes of previous newcomers.)

“You’re going to bring in STEM workers whose points, in terms of education etc., would actually not get them in here” under the usual approach, said David Green, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia.

“It’s not like there’s an infinite number of really good STEM workers out there. There’s going to be a distribution, and by doing this, we are going down to the less competent part of the distribution.”

Source: Ottawa to focus on tech-related immigration despite industry headwinds

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