Yalnizyan: Allowing undocumented immigrants to stay and work in Canada — permanently — would benefit us all

2023/04/13 Leave a comment

Rather than another piecemeal change to immigration policy, the government needs to move from the narrow Permanent Residents focus of annual planning and expand that to include targets (i.e., caps) on temporary workers and students and align a global permanent and temporary resident immigration plan with housing, healthcare and infrastructure capacity.

Not convinced that the economic benefits will be as strong as Armine suggests and we would be largely increasing the numbers of lower-paid and lower-skilled, rather than the higher-skilled needed to improve productivity.

It would also be helpful to have more accurate numbers on the number of undocumented, including visa overstays as the US regularly does as the figures cited by advocates have never been rigorously substantiated (CBSA should be able to collect information on visa overstays):

Want higher pay? A bigger economy with more household purchasing power? More revenues for public programs? Less exploitation of people at work and in society?

It’s all possible. Everyone can win, but the argument is counterintuitive, and may challenge your notions about fairness, process, and who gets to be Canadian. Stay with me on this.

The problem

Canada has long issued permits for people to temporarily come work and study in Canada, but the recent growth in this practice is staggering. By the end of 2022, in the name of fast-tracking solutions to labour shortages for business, the number of temporary foreign workers increased by 50 per cent compared to 2021, to almost 800,000 people.

In less than a generation, there has been an 8.5-fold increase in the numbers we permit to temporarily come work and study here, to 1.6 million in 2022 from 189,000 such residents in 2000. There was no public debate if this was good policy.

Colleges and universities now rely on the high fees they can charge international students, and we now take for granted the endless army of permanently temporary workers who chop and clean in restaurant kitchens, erect and renovate buildings, clean at night and care for your loved ones during the day.

We don’t know what share of temporary residents come here hoping to stay, but the complex maze of rules and conditions — requiring multiple applications and precise timing — guarantees some people will find no pathways to permanence, and others will run out of time trying.

Some leave, some are deported, and some live among us without official status. That opens the door to all sorts of bad economic outcomes. In 2007, the RCMP said between 200,000 and 500,000 were undocumented. It’s surely higher today, given how we’re expanding the inflows. That’s bad for them, and it’s bad for us. 

The fix

The solution is a regularization program for those who have simply overstayed time-stamps on their authorized entries, or whose official authorization is about to run out, with either no path to permanence or a tortured one, at best.

We need them, and they want to be here. Let them stay. Permanently.

Let me show you what this could mean for just one person.

Meet Sam

Sam (I have changed his name to protect his identity), came to Canada from India in the spring of 2019 as a bright and hopeful 17-year-old international student, legally permitted to study and work here.

His parents borrowed the first instalment of $8,500 for his $25,000-a-year, two-year business degree at a southern Ontario college. He worked part-time at a gas station, where he made $900 a month, covering his rent ($550), food and bus fare, but not much else. He, too, had to borrow money to cover the costs of education. 

When COVID hit, he was worried he’d fail because online learning was such a disorganized disaster, so his boss suggested he switch immigration status from international student to temporary foreign worker. The boss introduced him to an immigration “specialist” who charged $3,500 to prepare a Labour Market Impact Assessment, $2,500 for a work permit, and a $1,000 fee.

The specialist bungled the application process, leaving Sam in legal limbo after almost a year of waiting. Meanwhile, he was working 50 hours a week, for cash. It was half the minimum wage. He knew what his rights were, but could not enforce them.

Desperate to avoid deportation, he applied for a temporary work permit through the International Mobility Program. Another year, another negative result because of filing mistakes, another $3,000.

Sam was exploited by everyone: the post-secondary system, his employer, the immigration specialist. He is terrified of staying. He’s terrified of going.

As an undocumented worker, he can only find cash jobs that are dirty, dangerous and difficult. Returning to India would mean he would never earn enough to repay his loans.

I met Sam through the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, whose ambitious and strategic advocacy on this issue has built pressure on the federal government to make good on its promise to deal with a problem of its own making. A move is expected soon.

That could mean a lot of things. All involve better economic outcomes. How much better? 

By the numbers

According to a 2021 study by the Center for American Progress, regularizing the undocumented in the United States could add $1.7 trillion in GDP over the next 10 years and 439,000 jobs over and above the work done under the table by the roughly five million undocumented workers in the U.S.

(Canada is a country more reliant on newcomers than the U.S.; and while I was unable to find such analysis here, similar dynamics apply, on a smaller scale.)

It is estimated these workers would see about $4,000 more a year in the first five years after becoming a permanent resident (a 10 per cent increase), and $14,000 more annually in the next five years (a 32 per cent increase).

That’s because regularization permits workers to find better jobs, better opportunities, and the chance to openly use their skills. Status also gives people access to education and health care, and protection by labour standards lessens workplace injuries and illness.

Then there’s the payoff: better-paid workers and those no longer in the underground cash economy pay more sales taxes, property taxes (embedded in rents), and income taxes, supporting more public goods.

Regularization = better jobs + stronger public services + more economic resilience. It’s beautiful math. 

Win-win-win … when?

Regularization is a common practice in Europe, but it hasn’t happened in Canada since 1973. 

When Pierre Trudeau regularized almost 40,000 people, 60 per cent were undocumented residents, but 40 per cent were those seeking transition from temporary to permanent status, mostly international students and visitors.

It was a legacy move, securing decades of newcomer support for Liberals, but it was not an obvious thing to do. In 1973, unemployment was rising due to the first global oil price shock.

David Moffette, professor of immigration policy at the University of Ottawa, underscored a surprising fact: “Nobody politicized the issue. Nobody said, ‘Don’t let these people in.’ There was no trace of opposition to the program.” The reality was that these people were already living and working here. Nobody wanted a growing population of the undocumented in Canada. We’re at a similar moment.

Locking the doors isn’t enough

The recent closing of Roxham Road and all unauthorized entry points to Canada locks the back door; but unauthorized entries (roughly 40,000 people in 2022) have never been the main source of undocumented populations. The vast majority become undocumented by overstaying time-stamps on authorized entries.

The federal government is aware.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser’s mandate letter requires he build on pilot projects his government created in 2021-22 to regularize the status of some undocumented workers in critical sectors like health care and construction.

The take-up has been underwhelming, with these projects welcoming fewer than 10,000 people into the Canadian family, largely due to highly restrictive rules. Therein lies the clue for what comes next, and it looks a lot like the program of 1973: accept those who are already here — working, studying and contributing to communities across Canada — who want to build their lives here.

As the economy slows, providing permanent resident status to the undocumented and those holding temporary permits would maximize their economic and fiscal contributions.

That’s the business case. 

The humane case is an even easier one to make.

Instead of creating impossible Catch-22 situations for Sam and hundreds of thousands of people just like him, we could unlock his future — and in so doing, ours.

Source: Allowing undocumented immigrants to stay and work in Canada — permanently — would benefit us all

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Skuterud: Using immigration to fill vacant, lower-skilled jobs is not sound economic policy

2023/04/12 Leave a comment

Mikal continues his crusade, rightly, against the flaws of the government’s approach in terms of productivity. Unfortunately, appears governments and business are not listening to these warnings:

Ask a Canadian why the government is increasing immigration and more often than not they will tell you: “to grow our economy.” Ask an economist and you’ll rarely get that answer.

Boosting the economic well-being of a population is indeed a worthwhile objective of immigration, but that requires more than simply making the economy bigger.

India’s economy is 60 per cent bigger than Canada’s and Switzerland’s is 60 per cent smaller. Is India’s economy what we are aiming for? Making the economic pie as big as possible is clearly not the objective. What matters is the size of the average slice when the pie is divided by the population.

The immigration policies that the current Liberal government adopted in 2015 reflected two decades of reforms focused on leveraging immigration to boost GDP per capita, the size of the average slice – a sound economic objective. But this government has shifted the objective to something new.

The government hinted at its objective in March when it rationalized Canada’s surging population – a one million increase last year – as an alleged economic necessity to fill vacant jobs, which if focused on lower skilled jobs is more likely to lower than raise GDP per capita.

Other times, however, the government has been less than transparent. The government’s opacity in what it is trying to achieve leaves us to guess.

Perhaps it is trying to maximize our population to raise our geopolitical influence on the world stage or to keep small towns in the Maritimes from disappearing.

But why then limit our annual immigration target to only 500,000? Why not announce to the world that if you get here, you will be granted permanent residency status on arrival?

That’s because economies have absorptive capacities. When our housing, social infrastructure and business-capital investments do not grow commensurately with our population, there are economic tradeoffs. Usually, the Canadians most adversely affected by these tradeoffs are existing immigrants competing for housing, jobs and social services in the same communities as the newcomers.

Perhaps the objective is humanitarian, that is it’s more about boosting the economic well-being of the newcomers themselves. If that is true, however, then we should target the world’s poorest.

The world’s 20 poorest countries accounted for 8.2 per cent of the world’s population in the 2015-21 period but only 4.8 per cent of Canada’s new immigrants. The share of immigration dedicated to humanitarian objectives in the government’s latest targets is 19.8 per cent in 2023, 18.5 per cent in 2024, and 16.2 per cent in 2025. Humanitarian ideals is clearly not what this government is focused on.

The reality is that the objective of this government’s immigration policies is not the size of the economy, population growth, humanitarianism or GDP per capita.

Leveraging immigration to boost GDP per capita requires attracting the world’s best and brightest to drive innovation, productivity growth and job creation in advanced sectors that are intensive in new technologies, research and development, and STEM skills. That does not seem to be this government’s priority.

The priority of this government appears to be filling existing job slots with workers regardless of the value added of those jobs. The goal is overwhelmingly to support businesses by alleviating the competitive labour market pressures they are facing to increase the wages and productivity of their work forces.

This is evident in the government’s recent decision to reverse regulations introduced by its predecessors in 2014 to curtail business reliance on low-skill temporary foreign workers.

It is also evident in the government’s recent decision to waive all limits on the off-campus work activity of foreign students, whose numbers are exploding and who are heavily engaged in low-wage work.

Most significant, the government is now proposing a reform of its system for selecting candidates for economic-class immigration, known as the “express entry system,” which will target immigrants to fill existing job slots rather than being focused on attracting the world’s top talent.

Debates about immigration policy are contentious precisely because people have different objectives in mind.

The Immigration Department is launching a new initiative that will solicit the views of Canadians on optimal immigration policy. It is hard to believe that this exercise will be any more productive than asking Canadians how they would change the income tax rates they pay.

If we are going to solicit the views of all Canadians, I propose a rule: In making public statements about how Canada should reform its immigration policies, we must all first declare what objective we think the government’s immigration policies should be aiming to achieve and how that objective is best measured.

Mikal Skuterud is a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo and the director of the Canadian Labour Economics Forum.

Source: Using immigration to fill vacant, lower-skilled jobs is not sound economic policy

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Douglas Todd: B.C. desperately needs Ottawa to tie immigration levels to housing

2023/04/12 Leave a comment

More on housing and immigration levels:

Last week, hundreds of B.C. mayors and municipal councillors heard exactly why Ottawa’s failure to do so is causing them grief when it comes to providing adequate infrastructure, particularly affordable housing, but also schools, health-care facilities and daycares.

Delegates to the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention heard the country’s record population growth last year of one million was 96 per cent from offshore arrivals. Forty per cent of those newcomers were permanent residents and 60 per cent were temporary residents, especially foreign students.

The flood of foreign nationals is creating unprecedented demand for homes, which is pushing up rents and housing prices, which are among the highest in the world in cities like Vancouver and Toronto.

While people in Canada who already own homes, or serve as landlords, are benefiting, the rest are having to struggle with price-to-household income ratios that have soared since 2005 to among the worst in the Western world.

Chris Friesen, a national leader in providing settlement services for immigrants and refugees, told delegates it’s taking far too long for Ottawa to do the obvious and co-ordinate its migration policy with housing and other taxpayer-funded services.

Last year, British Columbia, which has almost no control over migration, took in 60,000 new permanent residents and 140,000 temporary residents, said Friesen, the longtime CEO of the Immigrant Services Society of B.C.

“And at the end of the day everybody is looking for a home,” said Friesen. Despite Kahlon’s recent efforts, Friesen criticized the way the NDP government in 2018 launched a 30-point housing strategy “and nowhere in that plan is there mention of immigrants, temporary residents or refugees.”

Friesen said service providers are increasingly talking about how the country’s “absorptive capacity” for newcomers is stretched. It’s not only affecting newcomers, he said, but Canadian-born residents, too.

A Statistics Canada report by Annik Gougeon and Oualid Moussouni showed immigrants bought 78 per cent of the homes purchased in Richmond in 2018, and more than 65 per cent of the dwellings bought in Surrey and Burnaby. Newcomers bought more than 40 per cent of homes in Vancouver, North Vancouver and New Westminster in 2018.

Dan Hiebert, professor emeritus of geography at the University of B.C., told the delegates that Canada would have to immediately build 1.36 million more houses and apartments just to reach the average homes-to-population ratios of the OECD, a club of well-off nations.

And to achieve “affordability” in the housing market, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has estimated the country would need to build 3.5 million extra housing units in the next seven years. Currently, only about 280,000 units are built each year.

The proportion of Metro Vancouver housing owned or rented by recent newcomers has doubled since 2016, according to census data. Growth rates are rocketing.

Permanent and non-permanent residents who arrived in the past five years alone now account for 14 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s population, eight per cent of all homeowners and 25 per cent of all renters.

Canada has not seen such high immigration rates since 1912, when 400,000 newcomers arrived, said Hiebert. Ottawa is now aiming for 500,000 new permanent residents each year. And that does not include hundreds of thousands of guest workers, plus the record 800,000 foreign nationals in the country on study visas.

Years ago, Hiebert referred to how Canada’s immigration policy is, in effect, Canada’s housing policy. Without knowing its origins, many UBCM attendees repeated the phrase frequently.

Hiebert suggested Canada’s dilemma is that arguably there might not be enough people to fill the country’s labour market, but there are too many for Canada’s housing market.

The vice-president of the Vancouver Board of Trade, David van Hemmen, said B.C. businesses are having difficulty attracting talent because of the alarming cost of housing. Some businesses, he said, are moving operations to Alberta or Washington state, to avoid B.C.’s daunting land costs.

While panelists and delegates consistently said the country should welcome newcomers, some civic officials who went to the microphones remarked on how Ottawa’s migration targets are “aggressive.”

Carling Helander, a provincial government immigration policy specialist who sat on the panel in lieu of Municipal Affairs Minister Anne Kang, acknowledged B.C.’s quest for new workers to address labour shortages creates a “circular loop” that tends to hike housing costs.=

A recent Gallup poll revealed 75 million people around the world want to move to Canada, the delegates heard. In addition, an Angus Reid Institute poll found newcomers are enthusiastic about getting into the housing market.

While 59 per cent of Canadian-born residents said “it’s important to own a home to feel like a real Canadian,” that figure jumps to 75 per cent among recent immigrants. While the individual earnings of recent immigrants are below average, Hiebert said household incomes are higher than most because more people tend to inhabit the same dwelling.

Friesen cited how the Liberal government’s humanitarian approach to asylum seekers from war-ravaged Ukraine exemplifies the absence of co-ordination between federal migration policy and local housing needs.

More than 175,000 asylum seekers from Ukraine have already landed in Canada, said Friesen. But 850,000 more have applied for refugee status. It’s just been announced they will have to forfeit their refugee application if they don’t get to Canada by March, 2024. All this, Friesen said, is being done without housing co-ordination.

The ISS of B.C. already has 13 full-time staff devoted to finding houses for asylum seekers and other newcomers, said Friesen. “Over 60 per cent of them land in Surrey in basement suites.”

Similar to B.C.’s housing minister, Friesen said this country badly needs a 10-year population growth strategy that matches arrivals with housing.

Source: Douglas Todd: B.C. desperately needs Ottawa to tie immigration levels to housing

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Canada’s housing and immigration policies are at odds

2023/04/12 Leave a comment

More commentary on the disconnect between immigration and housing (and other infrastructure and services):

Housing affordability has metastasized from a Toronto and Vancouver problem to a national crisis. Double-digit rent increases have hit traditionally more affordable communities coast to coast, and the cost of home ownership remains persistently high amid rising interest rates. One of the main reasons for the lack of affordability, according to our recent report, is the misalignment between Canada’s different levels of government.

Over all, Canada’s system of decentralized federalism has served us well. Allowing different levels of government to make decisions that suit their own contexts is usually the right approach when it comes to program delivery. A century ago, Louis Brandeis, then a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, famously referred to states as “laboratories” for policy experimentation. This holds true for Canadian provinces, and on the whole, the structure is healthy for a medium-sized country spread out over the world’s second-largest land mass.

Many factors have contributed to eroding housing affordability, but the fundamental problem is a growing mismatch between supply and demand. While residential construction in Canada has plateaued, falling well short of historical highs, our population is growing faster than that of any other G7 nation.

Canada’s population growth averaged 422,000 additional inhabitants per year (July to July) between 2012 and 2022, compared with 335,000 annually over the previous decade. This trend is accelerating, with net growth of more than 500,000 inhabitants in three of the past five years, including a record 703,404 between 2021 and 2022.

Meanwhile, housing completions have stagnated over the past five decades. Between 2012 and 2022, an average of 195,000 homes were built annually, down from 199,000 annually the decade before – and 229,000 annually during the 1970s, Canada’s home-building highpoint.

Which brings us back to Canada’s system of governance. Population growth is controlled in large part by the federal government, and home building primarily by provincial and local governments.

Since the early 1990s, immigration has replaced net births (births minus deaths) as Canada’s primary driver of population growth. Unlike birth rates, which governments can only indirectly influence, immigration numbers are determined by government policy. For example, Canada’s most recent Immigration Levels Plan aims to add 465,000 new permanent residents in 2023, then 485,000 in 2024, and 500,000 in 2025 – the highest immigration levels ever.

Provincial and local governments, meantime, are tasked with planning for and approving enough housing to keep up with this record population growth. They do so through a series of land-use and growth plans, starting at the provincial or regional level and ending with local plans and bylaws governing how much building is permitted to happen, and where.

In short, the federal government (and, to varying extents, provinces) wield a formidable lever over housing demand, while provinces and municipalities largely control the housing supply. Unfortunately, these two sets of policy levers – immigration policy versus growth planning – are essentially set in isolation of one another.

Immigration levels plans, which are updated every year, are partly informed by a series of federal-provincial/territorial agreements. However, none of the current agreements even mention the word “housing,” focusing instead on concerns such as labour market needs and language requirements. These are important considerations, but newcomers also need places to live.

Meanwhile, provincial and local growth planning takes years to implement and update. For example, the Ontario government updated its 2006 growth plan for the region surrounding Toronto in 2019, and again in 2020, giving municipalities until 2022 to adjust their local plans accordingly. However, municipal plans can take years to translate into updated zoning bylaws, if at all, and since there is no strict enforcement of growth plans’ housing targets, they amount to a best guess as to how communities might grow.

Further, the length of time it takes to create and execute local plans means their population growth assumptions are often outdated before or during their implementation. While immigration levels plans are updated annually, major provincial directives – such as Ontario’s 2022 target of getting 1.5 million homes built over the next decade – are already a step behind.

Federal, provincial and municipal policy makers all need to get on the same page. Canada’s housing shortage won’t end until immigration policies start reflecting the reality of our housing markets, or until land-use and growth planning accurately reflects population growth. Without better co-ordination, the housing crisis will likely get worse.

Steve Lafleur and Josef Filipowicz are policy analysts who research housing and taxation. This article is part of a project they undertook with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Source: Canada’s housing and immigration policies are at odds

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ICYMI – Keller: Why the Trudeau government was right to close Roxham Road

2023/04/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary pointing out the reality of trade-offs and the unreality of “open borders” and permanent residence for all:

If you’ve been dreaming of a guilt-free, morally pure, no-hard-choices solution to the problem of irregular border crossers into Canada, illegal border crossings in the United States, overwhelmed refugee determination systems in both countries and people smuggling in all directions, I offer you this simple answer: open borders.

Under open borders, anyone who wanted to move to Canada could. Simple as that. If 10 million immigrants wanted to come to Canada this year, then 10 million would.

There’d be no more refugee claimants sent back to the United States under the Safe Third Country Agreement. Anyone would be free to enter Canada, work as soon as they arrived, remain as long as they liked and become a citizen. There would be no need for an Immigration and Refugee Board to determine who is or isn’t a genuine legal refugee; there’d be no need for refugee claims at all. We would also get rid of Canada’s immigration points system, which gives priority to people with advanced educations and in-demand skills. We’d admit everyone, and give priority to no one.

There would be no annual immigration targets, such as this year’s target of 465,000 immigrants, including 266,000 economic immigrants, 78,000 spouses and children, 28,500 parents and grandparents and more than 92,000 refugees and compassionate cases. Under open borders, Canada would not select immigrants, and “no one is illegal” would not be a slogan. It would be the law.

While you ponder that, I should make it clear that I don’t think an open border is right for Canada. But unless you do, there’s no way to design an immigration system that doesn’t involve choices – sometimes hard and unpleasant ones – about who gets in and who doesn’t. There’s no avoiding it.

Many Canadians are uncomfortable with the closing of the Roxham Road-sized loophole in the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement. I believe the government made the right move, but the discomfort of the critics is not without reason – real people are affected, and not in pleasant ways.

However, unless you go all the way to open borders, every approach to immigration and refugee policy involves at least some people who want to come to Canada being denied entry. It’s inevitable.

The Roxham Road loophole was not a principled response to any of that. A Canadian family hoping to bring in their grandparents still had to apply from overseas and wait in a queue. Ditto regular immigrants from overseas. Same story for refugee claimants from Syria or Afghanistan in a refugee camp.

But if you were from a country where U.S. visa rules are loose enough, and you had enough cash for a plane ticket, you could fly to the United States and then slide into Canada’s refugee-determination system at Roxham Road. Or if you were able to get to Mexico, make it across the U.S. border and then head north, you could similarly jump the queue and make your claim directly on Canadian soil.

But every successful refugee claim at Roxham Road was quietly but effectively reducing the number of spots available to people in refugee camps an ocean away.

What’s more, unless our policy is that everyone who claims asylum gets asylum, we need some sort of legal process to figure out who is a refugee and who isn’t. Canada has such a system and, after detailed investigations that tend to last for years, it finds that many refugee claimants are not refugees, and orders them deported. That’s what happened to one of the families that recently died trying to illegally cross from Canada into the United States though Akwesasne Mohawk territory.

And then there’s the underpinning of our entire immigration strategy. The Trudeau government aims to raise immigration to 500,000 permanent residents a year by 2025 – roughly double the level under the Harper and Chrétien governments. That move was justified in 2016 by the government’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth as a plan for, well, economic growth. A higher population, said the council, would expand the economy, but only if new immigrants are more productive than average Canadians will each slice of pie grow faster than the number of forks. If immigrants are less productive than Canadians, the number of forks will grow faster than the pie.

“An increase in overall economic output (GDP) is a positive thing for Canada,” wrote the council, “but only if the expansion translates to a rise in living standards for the average Canadian (GDP per capita). This goal can be achieved by focusing the recommended increase in immigration flows among educated and highly skilled workers, and those with specialized skill sets lacking in Canada.”

In other words, Canada’s immigration policy is not just about having more Canadians, but more educated, skilled and productive Canadians. To do that, newcomer immigrants have to be mostly young, educated and skilled. One big knock against the Liberal government is that while many new immigrants meet the criteria, too many do not. Immigration can raise everyone’s living standards, but only if we’re selective about who we let in, and who we do not.

To govern is to choose. There’s no getting around it. Nowhere is that more true than at the border.

Source: Why the Trudeau government was right to close Roxham Road

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How welcoming are communities to immigrants? Researchers …

2023/04/10 Leave a comment

Useful initiative but the test will be in the degree to which it is used and how it effects change.

Ironic, to say the least, that the first indicator pertains to housing where the welcome falls flat:

How welcoming are communities across Canada to immigrants and refugees who come here seeking to build new lives? A group of researchers have designed a new tool they say can help measure this, as well as a second tool they hope will help communities identify ways of addressing the obstacles that prevent immigrants from succeeding.

The initiative is being led by Western University professor Victoria Esses, who researches immigration policy. It was launched by Pathways to Prosperity, an alliance of university, community and government partners that works to ease integration into Canadian society for immigrants and minorities.

The measuring tool consists of a list of 19 characteristics, such as housing, employment and anti-racism initiatives – all of which the researchers say are key factors in creating a welcoming community. The tool provides a set of indicators for each characteristic, to help communities measure how welcoming they are.

At a time when Canada is admitting record-high numbers of immigrants, keeping track of these things is crucial, Prof. Esses said. For new arrivals, finding affordable housing, employment, schools, social services and health care can be daunting. When immigrants don’t feel welcome in a community, they often leave.

“If we don’t know how welcoming those communities are, and if they’re not retaining newcomers, then the program bringing in that many people is going to fail,” she said.

Last year, the federal government announced it was increasing its immigration targets for the next three years. It is now aiming to admit almost 1.5 million new permanent residents to Canada by the end of 2025 in order to respond to significant labour shortages and an aging population. The boost is also intended to attract newcomers to rural communities.

Prof. Esses said the measuring tool is particularly important for small- and medium-sized communities, because they historically have not absorbed a great deal of immigrants. Now, many are working to attract and retain them.

In addition to affordable housing, employment and social services, another important thing for communities to address is anti-immigrant discrimination, Prof. Esses said.

She added that it will be important for communities to measure their progress over time, determine how well immigrants are faring and put in place new strategies and structures to address any gaps that are identified. “A really important piece of this is that some of this measurement will be a baseline,” she said.

The second tool – the one for addressing gaps – will include best practices based on evidence, she said. If a community discovers it has gaps, the kit will provide potential solutions.

“I support the government’s program of bringing in many immigrants in the next few years. I think that’s great,” Prof. Esses said. “But I think this piece of welcoming communities is crucial, and I can’t emphasize enough that those two really go hand in hand.”

Source: How welcoming are communities to immigrants? Researchers …

Toolkit Link: Welcoming Communities Toolkit

Filed under Immigration, Integration Tagged with ,

Record immigration, nowhere to live. Welcome to Australia’s rent crisis

2023/04/07 Leave a comment

Sounds familiar:

For Meg Edwards, it was $30 that sealed the deal.

The 20-year-old international relations student and her two housemates were struggling to find a home in Melbourne’s hypercompetitive, inner-city rental market, having inspected close to two dozen properties over the course of a couple of months.

“It was getting pretty stressful,” Edwards tells AFR Weekend. “There’s one place where we were calling the agent every day to make it really clear that we were interested.”

The real estate agent for the three-bedroom terrace house in North Melbourne told the trio they would need to offer more than the advertised $770 price if they wanted to stand out from the other 25 applicants and have a chance of securing the property.

“So we did end up doing that, and we did end up getting it,” Edwards says, with the group offering $800 per week for the home. “Obviously, we were pretty lucky to be able to do that. But not everyone can.”

What happened to Edwards and her friends was a clear breach of Victoria’s tough rental-bidding laws, which state higher offers cannot be solicited by an agent. Unfortunately, with Australia in the grip of what experts say is a rental crisis, what happened to the group is not likely a one-off.

Advertised rents have galloped 10 per cent higher in the past 12 months, research house CoreLogic says, and that adds to the cost-of-living pressures households already grapple with, such as soaring energy bills and grocery prices.

Worse, moving to a cheaper rental isn’t an easy alternative. Finding a place to live is harder now than at any time in at least two decades, with just 1.1 per cent of the nation’s stock of rental properties available for lease.

The country’s rental market is clearly out of balance, says Brendan Coates, the Grattan Institute’s economic policy program director.

“The rule of thumb vacancy rate for a healthy rental market – one where renters can find somewhere to live that suits their preferences and budget in a reasonable time frame – is around 3 per cent,” Coates tells AFR Weekend.

The situation is even worse in smaller capital cities such as Adelaide and Perth, where fewer than 1 in every 200 rental properties were vacant in February.

But the crisis facing renters, with few vacancies and rapidly rising prices, didn’t arise overnight. It’s the inevitable consequence of what happens when high, and rising, demand collides with limited supply. That, in turn, is the result of decades of policy failure and inaction across all levels of government. It took the pandemic, with its resulting inflation outbreak and flood of immigration, to bring it to a head.

It’s a problem being felt around the world. But in this country it is happening alongside forecasts for chronic underbuilding, property prices that have increased so rapidly that an entire generation of Australians believe home ownership is out of reach, and a system that treats property as just another asset class, favouring landlords at the expense of renters.

Finding a way out of this big squeeze won’t be easy.

Immigration and the ‘race for space’

On the demand side, Coates says a shift toward living in smaller households has contributed to the extraordinary tightness in rental markets.

“In a hybrid work world, people want more space to themselves and to live in smaller households. This means for a given number of renters, we need more rentals to go around,” he tells AFR Weekend.

The average number of people living in a household fell to 2.55 in 2021 from 2.59 in 2016, analysis of census data by real estate analysts at PropTrack shows. That means 160,000 more dwellings are required to meet the housing needs of the population.

“The ‘race for space’ started during COVID-19 and had a more subdued effect because borders were closed and there were no arrivals,” Coates says. “Now that migration has come roaring back, we have both more people and each person wanting more space.”

Treasury forecasts an influx of 650,000 migrants between this financial year and the next, as the reopening of Australia’s borders prompts the return of international students, working holidaymakers and skilled migrants, who are in high demand thanks to a chronic shortage of workers.

Coates says the migration boom contributes to the dwindling availability of rentals, as migrants compete with locals to snap up a shrinking number of homes for lease. “The more people there are, the more houses we need. And we are adding people a lot faster than we are adding houses,” he says.

Centre for Independent Studies chief economist Peter Tulip says the federal government has an obligation to help fix the problem of inadequate housing supply given it is responsible for the immigration program. “Canberra needs to ensure that new migrants have somewhere to live,” the former RBA researcher tells AFR Weekend.

The migration surge is bad news for renters in Sydney and Melbourne, where property markets are expected to bear a disproportionate share of the burden of the influx, given their popularity with international students.

Compounding the problem is that the boom comes as the construction industry is scaling back its plans to build more homes, burnt by rising interest rates and soaring material costs that have pushed a raft of builders into bankruptcy.

It means Australia will fall short of its housing needs between 2023 and 2027 by 106,300 dwellings, a report released on Monday by the government-run National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation said.

The rise of NIMBYism

A major handbrake on new housing supply has been the influence of existing homeowners who object to new developments in their communities. Known as NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard), their power is derived from their sheer number.

Twice as many Australians own property than rent – about a third of households own outright, and another third are paying off a mortgage – and to much of that cohort nearby development equates to putting their lifestyle and the value of their property at risk.

As such, the path of least resistance for politicians is to accommodate the will of a homeowning class through tough planning laws that restrict medium- and higher-density construction.

Limiting what can get built and where it’s built restricts the supply of new homes, making life harder for renters and prospective first home buyers by driving up rents and house prices. The problem is most evident in wealthy areas, where demand for new housing is high but very little is being built.

Councils in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs and lower north shore were the city’s most anti-development local government areas, CIS’ Tulip’s research showed last month. While the research only looked at Sydney, the findings would almost certainly translate to other housing markets.

Tulip found that council areas like Woollahra, Hunters Hill and Mosman built almost no new homes over the past few years. Between 2016 and 2021, Woollahra council built just 61 homes a year, while Hunters Hill – the smallest council area in Sydney – gained 12 homes annually on average and Mosman built 33 homes a year. The figures equate to tepid 0.2 per cent annual growth in the dwelling stock in each of the three harbourside locales.

Tulip found that most building took place in Sydney’s western suburbs, even though demand for housing was highest in the city’s inner and eastern suburbs.

While some planners argue that NIMBYs are not important since technical panels – not residents – make planning decisions, Tulip says it’s more complex. “The panels are guided by parameters set by politicians. And the politicians set restrictive parameters because they perceive their voters would object to new housing,” he says. “So the implication of this claim that public opinion is not driving planning decisions is false.”

Concerns about higher density developments harming neighbourhood character, which drives opposition to new homes from residents, are misplaced, Tulip says.

“There are lots of stories of people who opposed developments before they were built who then change their mind after seeing the final outcome,” he adds. “In particular, they like the new shops, restaurants and transport services that accompany higher density.”

In Sydney suburbs dominated by high-rise, such as Chatswood, Green Square and Liverpool, Tulip says house prices didn’t fall when development increased, in a sign that the lift in density had no effect on amenity. “I suspect that NIMBY opposition is just fear of the unknown,” Tulip says.

No silver bullet

Because the problem with the housing market stems in part from government policy, relief for renters can only come from government intervention. In the short-term Coates says the immediate priority for the federal government should be to increase rent assistance, which is a supplementary payment made to people on welfare who are also renting.

“Rent assistance works,” Coates says. “In 2021, it reduced housing stress levels for recipients nationwide from 72 per cent to 46 per cent.

“But the maximum rate of rent assistance hasn’t kept pace with the rising rents paid by low-income renters.”

For a single, the maximum fortnightly payment is $157.20, or just $79 per week, and research by economists at AHURI found that over one-third of recipients were still in rental stress after the payment was considered.

Rent assistance was already too low, even before the latest rental squeeze, says Australian National University associate professor Ben Phillips.

“Over the longer term we know that low-income renters are increasingly struggling and for that rent assistance is one part of the answer while the other part is some rebuilding of public housing and encouraging other forms of social housing and rental investment in lower cost housing options,” Phillips says.

A 40 per cent increase in rent assistance would cost the federal government about $2 billion, the Grattan Institute says, but it would go straight towards easing the cost of living for those struggling the most in the private rental market.

One way to pay for the increase would be to make the payment better targeted, with the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute estimating that 419,000 renters on moderate incomes receive rent assistance, while some renters on low income are missing out.

In a report last year, the Productivity Commission said an increase in rent assistance should be a priority, citing the fact the value of the payment had declined over time relative to rents, while urging the federal government to make the support better targeted.

Coates says there is also a case for state governments to lift the rate of land tax applying to short-stay accommodation platforms like Airbnb to encourage owners to return the properties to the rental market.

“That would come with a cost because fewer Airbnb would mean less regional tourism, and therefore fewer regional jobs. But it would be better than seeing families in regional Australia living in caravan parks, tents and cars.”

He also says state governments should consider expanding “hard leasing”, where the public sector takes out a lease on private rentals and sublets them to vulnerable people. Coates says governments should also buy existing homes and turn them into social housing.

ANU’s Phillips says purchasing existing dwellings would be an easy way for the government to increase the stock of public housing. “This has the advantage of being more timely but also removes the issue of public housing concentrating disadvantage in one small area.”

Build more homes

In the long run, most experts say the only solution is to relax planning laws and build more homes.

“This is the recommendation of a succession of official reports into housing affordability,” Tulip says, referring to reports by the Productivity Commission and former RBA governor Glenn Stevens. “Those reports, in turn, summarise a mountain of academic research from Australia and overseas.“

Tulip says governments need to set and enforce high housing targets for local councils, while also funding infrastructure that would allay concerns about overcrowding. “This preserves local control over the type and precise location of new construction, without letting local residents restrict the supply, as they otherwise would.”

Coates says the focus needs to be on building both government-owned social housing and market rate homes.

Grattan Institute research found the stock of government-subsidised social housing, which stands at 430,000 dwellings, had barely increased in 20 years even though the population had increased by more than a third.

“The Senate should pass the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) bill so we have a healthy stream of funding to help grow our social housing stock in line with population growth, and the fund should be increased from $10 billion to $20 billion,” Coates says.

The HAFF is one of the Albanese government’s two signature housing initiatives, but it lacks Senate support, with the Greens and Independent Senator David Pocock saying it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough given the scale of the problem.

And Tulip says the $10 billion initiative, designed to fund 6000 social and affordable homes per year, is close to useless. “Thirty-thousand new subsidised dwellings over five years is not much more than a rounding error in a housing market with hundreds of thousands of new households each year,” he says.

Labor’s other major policy – an accord with the states to build 1 million homes over five years – has also been criticised for a lack of ambition and insufficient detail. But despite questions over how it will operate, Coates says the accord has the potential to be a game changer.

“But that will only happen if the Albanese government puts enough money on the table to push state and territory governments to ease land-use planning rules, to enable more housing, including more high-density housing, to be built.”

Tough times

The bad news for renters is that the situation will probably get worse before it gets better. An increasing population, a subdued construction pipeline and inaction by federal and state governments means people who don’t own their own home should brace for more rent rises.

Together with already-high property prices and the likelihood that higher mortgage rates will make it even tougher for new buyers to get into the market, the rental crisis is just a part of a longer-term problem.

Australia’s housing economy, and broader social compact, is based around people owning their home by the time they retire. For many who don’t, paying ever-rising rents with modest super and pensions will be unaffordable.

While Tulip concedes it will be politically difficult to relax planning laws and build more homes, he says there is no alternative.

“It will be difficult to get meaningful improvements in affordability until we see a change in social values,” he says. “As a society, we need to show more concern for renters and future homebuyers and less concern for wealthy busybodies.”

Edwards, who is still settling into her North Melbourne home, says enforcing existing rules around rental bidding would make the market fairer.

“[Bidding] just completely rules some people out, which is just not fair. Because some people can offer more money doesn’t really mean that they’re going to be a better tenant.”

While she only signed a one-year lease, Edwards wouldn’t mind staying longer. But under the rules of Australia’s rental market, the decision won’t be entirely her own.

Source: Record immigration, nowhere to live. Welcome to Australia’s rent crisis

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Once-popular rural Quebec road for asylum seekers quiets down after U.S.-Canada deal

2023/04/07 Leave a comment

As expected:

About 12 hours after the closure of a rural southern Quebec road used by thousands of asylum seekers to enter Canada from the United States, Evelyne Bouchard witnessed RCMP agents escort a family of four people off her property.

Bouchard, whose farm is located about two kilometres from the forested pathway known as Roxham Road, says she is used to seeing police around her home; at times, she has found clothing and unknown footprints in the snow on her Hemmingford, Que., property.

In a recent interview, she said it was upsetting to see people being taken away so soon after the Canada-United States immigration deal closed Roxham Road to most would-be refugees.

“It’s that contrast,” she said. “This is like my happy place — my home. I love this place, and to think that someone in that same kind of physical space is feeling afraid and vulnerable and is possibly in danger is just completely heartbreaking.”

Officials say the massive wave of would-be refugees crossing into Canada has slowed significantly since the end of March, when the government negotiated a deal with the United States to turn away asylum seekers at unofficial border crossings like Roxham Road, closing a long-standing loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement.

That agreement assumes that Canada and the U.S. are “safe” countries for would-be refugees. It also forces asylum seekers to apply for refugee status in the first country they enter — Canada or the U.S. — and prohibits them from crossing the border to file a claim.

Estelle Muzzi, mayor of border community St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, said residents who live near Roxham Road have reported a decrease in foot traffic in the area since the treaty was expanded.

“The message is getting through because I’m told that it’s gone down dramatically — there’s a big drop in traffic,” Muzzi said in a recent interview.

“I think that for the citizens of St-Bernard-de-Lacolle who were very affected by the situation, those who live right next to the border, for them, the most important thing was to find some peace and quiet,” Muzzi said.

Frances Ravensbergen, an activist with Bridges Not Borders, a refugee advocacy group in Hemmingford, said local volunteers have also reported a decline in the number of people arriving to cross through Roxham Road.

“The few people that we have seen crossing either don’t seem to be completely aware of the new regulations … and not realizing that if you’re handed back to the Americans, you may never apply for asylum again in Canada,” Ravensbergen said in an interview.

But despite the drop in people arriving at Roxham Road, Ravensbergen said she thinks scenes like the RCMP arrest on Bouchard’s property will be replicated across the country. Now that asylum seekers are blocked from using that road, they will likely try to enter Canada through other spots along the 9,000-kilometre border that separates the two countries, she said.

Border officials are also reporting a drop in the number of migrants trying to cross the border between official ports of entry. The Canada Border Services Agency said that from March 25 to April 2, it recorded 191 cases of people crossing irregularly. Out of that total, 144 claimants were returned to the U.S. in accordance with the expanded agreement; 54 were deemed eligible to make an asylum claim in Canada.

Before the new treaty went into effect, the government reported that since December of 2022, about 4,500 people were crossing through Roxham Road every month.

Now, the CBSA said that when RCMP agents or local police intercept would-be refugees trying to cross at irregular checkpoints, they take them to a designated — and official — port of entry. There, border officials determine whether or not their claim is eligible.

An asylum seeker is permitted to cross an irregular checkpoint under four circumstances: they have family members living legally in Canada; they are an accompanied minor; they have legal documents such as a Canadian visa or valid work permit; or their application for refugee status is considered in the “public interest.”

“If an individual does not meet an (agreement) exception or is otherwise determined inadmissible, they will be removed to the U.S. If the refugee claim is eligible, the person’s file will be referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board for consideration, and the person will be authorized to enter Canada to pursue their claim for protection,” Maria Ladouceur, a spokesperson for the agency, said by email.

Viviane Albuquerque, a Canadian and U.S. immigration lawyer based in Montreal, explained that once an asylum seeker has crossed Roxham Road to Canada and is deemed ineligible to claim asylum, it becomes almost impossible for the individual to seek asylum in Canada ever again.

“Once there is a determination based on your status — a refused refugee claim — it is very difficult to apply for refugee status again unless (the asylum seeker) tries to appeal the decision in court,” Albuquerque said in an interview.

Bouchard said she was hoping for a long time that Canada and the U.S. would renegotiate the Safe Third Country Agreement — to make it easier for migrants to file asylum claims in either country.

“It was just such a gut punch that it went in exactly the opposite direction to what we’d hoped, making it more dangerous and more difficult and driving people into the woods, where they’re more likely to be in danger.”

Source: Once-popular rural Quebec road for asylum seekers quiets down after U.S.-Canada deal

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Worker shortage? Canada’s supply of labour is actually robust

2023/04/06 Leave a comment

Undercuts the case made by business organizations, governments and advocates for current immigration increases and greater flexibility for temporary workers and students:

For many years, the corporate sector in Canada has pointed to labour shortages as a persistent challenge – one that’s getting worse as the country ages and baby boomers head into retirement.

In the Bank of Canada’s latest Business Outlook Survey, published Monday, companies indicated that labour shortages were their second-most pressing concern, behind cost pressures. Small-business owners consistently say that a lack of skilled and unskilled workers is the biggest impediment to increasing sales, according to surveys from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

But these responses can obscure a simple fact: The supply of workers in Canada is growing quickly, and among some groups, participation in the labour market has never been higher.

As of February, that participation rate – the proportion of the population 15 or older that is working or looking for a job – was 65.7 per cent. That’s the same as in April, 2018.

To be sure, it has drifted lower from its peak levels of almost 68 per cent in the 2000s as Canada has aged.

Still, that clouds some milestones. The participation rate for Canadians 15 to 64 – what is often called the working-age population – has jumped to record levels, above 80 per cent, in recent months. In raw terms, the sum of labour market participants has surpassed 21 million, a first for the economy.

And with the unemployment rate just shy of an all-time low, it’s generally been a fruitful period for job seekers.

“Across the board – across basically all demographic groups – participation is at record highs or near record highs,” said Andrew Fields, a senior analyst at Statistics Canada.

The macroeconomic environment is certainly a draw for potential workers. Over the past three months, Canada has enjoyed a net gain of 241,000 jobs, despite higher interest rates meant to slow the economy. The Bank of Canada’s survey of consumers, also published Monday, showed that households think a recession is the most likely scenario over the next year. Even so, people are feeling upbeat about the labour market“Despite uncertainty about the economy, workers view the job market as strong. Respondents, particularly those not satisfied with their current job, are confident they can find new work,” the central bank’s report said.

Over the long term, immigration has been the main driver of population growth and, in turn, new workers. In a 2022 report, Statscan said immigrants accounted for 84 per cent of labour force growth in the 2010s.

The demographic profile of those newcomers is also helpful. According to the 2021 census, about three-quarters of immigrants who have been in Canada for 10 or fewer years were between the ages of 25 and 54 – prime years for working. Among people born in Canada, the proportion in that age bracket was 46 per cent.

This wave of newcomers is part of a deliberate plan to increase the supply of workers. The federal government is ramping up its intake of permanent residents to 500,000 annually by 2025, more than 60 per cent of whom will migrate through economic programs.

Lately, however, it’s not been solely a story of immigration. The employment rate of mothers (aged 25 to 54) with a youngest child under 6 was 76.6 per cent in January – a jump of almost four percentage points in a year.

Statscan said women with young children “are typically less likely to be employed, and these increases can reflect a tight labour market as well as a range of factors, such as the need to meet household financial requirements or changing access to childcare.”

The national child-care plan, which the federal government announced in 2021, is already delivering cost savings to parents with children in regulated daycare. Ottawa is betting that more access to affordable child care will boost female labour participation, much as it has in Quebec, which started a low-fee program in 1997.

Martha Friendly, the executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, said staff retention will be critical to creating more child-care spaces, given that industry wages can be meagre.

“It is absolutely clear that you can’t expand the supply of child care unless you actually address the work force issues. Because the people are the program,” she said.

Another theory to explain rising labour participation is that cost-of-living concerns are pushing more people to look for jobs. “If you have rising prices, some people are more likely to work,” Mr. Fields said.

Brendon Bernard, senior economist at hiring site Indeed Canada, stressed that while workers are broadly available, hiring could still be a challenge for some firms.

The situation is also a matter of perspective: Companies say there aren’t enough workers – but they’re also recruiting far more people than usual. At times last year, there were more than one million job vacancies, roughly double the number before the pandemic.

There are recent signs that the labour market is slackening. Job vacancies have tumbled about 24 per cent since last spring, although they are still elevated by historical standards. And in the Bank of Canada’s business survey, respondents said labour shortages were less intense than a year ago and it was easier to hire the workers they needed.

Despite the threat of a recession, companies have yet to implement widespread layoffs that would push up the unemployment rate, as many economists have predicted.

“Businesses are potentially waiting till the last minute, or waiting until they’re fully certain that the situation is going south, to actually start laying off workers in large numbers,” Mr. Bernard said.

“We haven’t hit that turning point.”

Source: Worker shortage? Canada’s supply of labour is actually robust

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Ontario regulator eases restrictions for some foreign-trained doctors to work in Canada 

2023/04/06 Leave a comment

Progress:

Ontario’s physician regulator is making it easier for doctors who were trained in the U.S., Ireland, Australia and Britain to practise medicine in the province, as jurisdictions around the country compete to remove licensing barriers in an effort to address chronic shortages in health care.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), which licenses and oversees more than 35,000 practising physicians, says it will allow doctors trained and certified in the U.S. to skip exams and begin working immediately. It’s also removing supervision and assessment requirements for family doctors from the U.S., Ireland, Australia and Britain if they have already been approved by the College of Family Physicians of Canada, the national certification body, allowing them to practice independently more quickly.

Alberta recently made a similar move, with the announcement of a pilot project targeting physicians from those four countries, offering them a simpler path to licensing. Last month, Nova Scotia became the first province in Canada to allow physicians who were trained in the U.S. to skip certification exams and begin working immediately.

A recent Globe and Mail investigation found Canada is increasingly losing foreign-trained physicians to other countries, as other developed nations lower barriers to licensing and step up recruitment. And fewer international medical graduates are choosing to start careers in Canada: the number of international applicants to entry-level residency positions has fallen 40 per cent between 2013 and 2022.

Groups that represent foreign-trained doctors say they’re happy Canada’s regulatory colleges are beginning to remove barriers for some physicians. But they note that there are still thousands of physicians who were trained outside the country and are unable to find paths to licensing.

They argue more must be done to remove obstacles that prevent internationally trained doctors from working, at a time when staffing shortages are causing significant problems for Canadian patients, clinics and hospitals.

“We’re glad there’s going to be some fast-tracking. But there’s a very serious concern it’s excluding the vast majority of people who come from other countries,” said Rosemary Pawliuk, a lawyer and spokesperson for the Society of Canadians Studying Medicine Abroad, an advocacy group for foreign-trained physicians.

“It’s still very much a system that rewards white, Commonwealth countries. And if you don’t come from one of those, the barriers are still very much up for you.”

Of the 5,948 new physicians who were registered in Ontario in 2021, 296 came from Saudi Arabia, making it the province’s top origin country for foreign-trained doctors. Ireland produced the second highest number, at 284. It was followed by Britain (133), India (129), Egypt (88), the U.S. (82) and Australia (62).

The college was unable to estimate how many more physicians may be able to begin working in Ontario under the new measures announced Tuesday.

Census records estimate that there are nearly 13,000 foreign-trained physicians living in Ontario but not working in their field because of licensing hurdles and other barriers. A report produced for the Ontario College of Family Physicians suggests nearly 15 per cent of the province’s population, or about 2.2 million people, is without regular access to a family doctor.

Shae Greenfield, a spokesperson for the CPSO, said physicians from the U.S., Ireland, Australia and Britain are being given preferential treatment because their medical training is considered the most similar to Canada’s. He said the idea that these people are particularly well suited to the Canadian system is supported by the experiences of senior Canadian physicians, who supervise foreign-trained doctors when they first enter the health care system here.

Yet there is significant disagreement within the Canadian medical community over rules that control who can and can’t be licensed, which some say discriminate against physicians who were trained elsewhere. Ms. Pawliuk argued regulators are restricting doctors from some countries as part of a policy to control health care spending by rationing the supply of physicians.

“It’s almost like you’ve got a bucket, and they’re pouring water into it, but they’ve ensured there’s a lot of holes in it so the bucket never fills,” she said.

Canadian and U.S.-trained medical graduates continue to get preference for residency positions, leaving vacancies that students from other countries could be filling, Ms. Pawliuk said. Across Canada this year, 268 family medicine residency positions went unfilled. That was the highest number ever, according to data from the Canadian Resident Matching Service.

Makini McGuire-Brown, a Jamaican-educated physician who chairs an advocacy group called Internationally Trained Physicians of Ontario, said foreign doctors remain an underutilized workforce in Canada. She said the announcement by the Ontario regulatory college follows a pattern of regulators favouring certain “approved jurisdictions” over others.

“The CPSO’s new policy is discriminatory and is the continuation of a pattern,” she said. “Instead of the CPSO improving upon age-old discrimination against less Eurocentric countries, they continue the trend.”

Source: Ontario regulator eases restrictions for some foreign-trained doctors to work in Canada 

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