Argitis: Canada’s population advantage offset by weak productivity

2023/01/04 Leave a comment

Good comments on the productivity conundrum and how the current focus in increased immigration is not addressing productivity and in fact is weakening productivity. But Argitis only states the issue and offers no approaches or solutions to address the issue:

Canada’s population grew by a whopping 362,453 people in three months through Oct. 1, a quarterly gain of 0.9 per cent. That’s the fastest quarterly increase since 1957. Canada’s population is up 2.3 per cent from a year ago—double the historic annual average over the past half century.

Almost all the growth came from non-Canadians moving here, illustrating how there is no greater competitive advantage we have as a country than open immigration policies free of the hang-ups and complexities that hamper population growth elsewhere.

The latest data shows the country hit a minor milestone sometime over the summer, surpassing the 39 million mark.

Since the start of the pandemic, our population has grown by one million people.

At the current pace, Canada will hit the much bigger milestone of 40 million people no later than 2025, which would represent an increase of about 10 million people in the first quarter of the current century. That would be almost a one-third increase in population, which blows past most of Canada’s peers.

Canada’s fast population growth, however, is masking deeper economic problems around productivity and underlying competitiveness.

The same quarterly population numbers released last month to measure per-capita output reveal a disturbing trend. When factoring out population, our economy has been completely stagnant over the past four years. There’s no growth outside of immigration.

For example, while real GDP increased 0.7 per cent in the third quarter, the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent on a per capita basis. In fact, there’s been no increase in per-capita output since 2018.

I can think of no bigger threat to the consensus around immigration than Canada’s inability to increase productivity and improve living standards of people already living here. …

Theo Argitis is the managing director of Compass Rose, a public affairs firm in Ottawa.

Source: Canada’s population advantage offset by weak productivity

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Mohamed: The Line’s Naughty List: The demographic crisis isn’t going away

2023/01/04 Leave a comment

Another article on the limits of immigration to address weak economic growth although ignoring the productivity issue. But just like increasing immigration is unlikely to significantly counter demographic trends of an aging population, a focus on increasing fertility is, given experience in other jurisdictions, unlikely to move the needle significantly.

Governments and policy makers need to consider alternative scenarios of how to manage an aging population rather than just focussing on semi-effective measures to slow down the trend:

The nearly concluded year of 2022 may well be remembered as the year generational politics finally arrived in Canada, even if nobody wants to talk about the root of our demographic dilemma. 

Saddled for over a decade with stagnating wages, escalating day-to-day living costs, and one of the world’s least-affordable housing markets, Canadians under the age of 40 finally said “enough” in 2022; making generational inequality, for the first time, a major nationwide political issue. 

Some of Canada’s pissed off young adults have found their messiah in 43-year-old Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, a rather cantankerous fellow himself. Poilievre has masterfully used Canada’s housing affordability crisis to tap into a groundswell of support among younger Canadians — recent polling show Poilievre’s Conservative party holding a double-digit leadamong voters between the ages of 18 and 34.

But even if their voices are finally being heard, young Canadians have precious little to look forward to as they start their working lives in earnest. The OECD projects that Canada’s economic growth will be dead last among advanced countries over the next decade. This means that young Canadians entering the workforce in the 2020s can expect the same grim job prospects, stagnant real incomes, and diminished purchasing power as their older cohorts who graduated into the Great Recession (insert James Franco “First time?” meme here). 

Barring a miraculous change of course, Millennial and Gen-Z Canadians will not only be worse off than their parents but will also see their standards of living deteriorate relative to people the same age in other countries. 

Yet for all his bluster and this real opportunity for a political breakthrough, Mr. Poilievre has offered no genuine solutions to this generational slide. 

So what can be done to reverse Canada’s great inter-generational stagnation? For one thing, we can attack the demographic underpinnings of our dismal growth projections.

The biggest challenge will be to mitigate the effect of our aging population on our labour markets. A record 307,000 Canadians retired last year and a further one-in-five workers are nearing retirement age. Retirements are pushing job vacancies to record levels and leaving behind a shrinking workforce to pick up the slack. By 2027, there will be just three working-agedCanadians for each senior citizen.

Policymakers in Ottawa are acutely aware of this problem and are banking on an already overburdened immigration system to provide an easy fix to our labour market woes. Last month, the Trudeau government unveiled an ambitious plan to bring in 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025 (an increase of nearly two-thirds from average annual admissions between 2015 and 2019). Since this announcement, even progressive outlets have voiced concerns about our capacity to absorb such a sharp influx of new Canadians.

As Andrew Potter recently wrote in The Line, the new immigration target places Canada’s fragile pro-immigration consensus at risk. New Canadians may well bear the brunt of intensifying populist anger if they’re seen as contributing to the country’s health-care and housing-affordability crises. (Chinese immigrants, for example, have already incurred a racial backlash for their alleged role in driving up housing prices in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.)

But even under ideal conditions, immigration would not be a silver-bullet solution to the labour-market challenges created by an aging native-born population. The average Canadian immigrant arrives in their late 20s and may need years to become licensed to work in their chosen occupation. Further, working immigrants often bring both non-working spouses and elderly relatives with them. These are just a few of the frictions that make the economic benefit of large-scale immigration subject to the law of diminishing returns. 

We also need to weigh the potential economic gains of increased immigration against the challenge some new immigrant communities may pose to our political climate by “importing” combustible ethno-cultural grievances. As I wrote in The Line earlier this year, diaspora politics is becoming increasingly visible in Canada and played a central role in Patrick Brown’s Conservative party leadership campaign.

Large-scale immigration has been a massive economic and cultural boon to Canada over the past half-century but it’s becoming increasingly evident that we’re fast approaching an inflection point. Future increases to immigration are likely to generate diminishing economic returns and escalating political costs. 

This leaves us with a rather simple equation. To reverse our forecasted economic slide, we must increase the supply of young Canadians relative to the number of older ones. To do this, we must find ways to encourage reproductive-aged Canadians to have more children. The arithmetic could not be more straightforward.

Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what’s happening. As I wrote back in August, Canada’s birth rate, which has long been the lowest in the Anglosphere, hit a record-low of 1.4 births-per-woman (bpw) during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. While it bounced back slightly last year, it still falls well below the OECD average of 1.7 bpw. 

A quick glance at the average price of a single-family home or daycare space in any major Canadian city should explain why cash-strapped millennials aren’t rushing to bring more children into the world. Indeed, beyond tackling our broader affordability crisis, all orders of government could be doing more to make starting families more affordable for young Canadians — Canada’s level of public spending on family benefits falls well below the average among OECD countries. 

The Trudeau government’s recently concluded bilateral agreements mark the third attempt at Canada-wide child care. Yet fewer than nine months after the last deal was inked, political will already appears to be faltering.

Part of the problem is that the bilateral agreements were pitched as a mechanism to guide Canada out of the “she-cession” created during the first year of the pandemic. This rationale rings hollow now that women’s labour force participation has bounced back to (and exceeded) pre-pandemic levels. 

Tying new family policies to Canada’s longstanding fertility crisis and, by extension, our future economic vitality, could give these initiatives more staying power.

One thing’s clear: the “f-word” (fertility) can no longer be a forbidden term in Canada’s political lexicon. Until we get serious about that, our demographic and political challenges will only get worse. 

Rahim Mohamed is a master’s student at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. His writing has appeared in The Hub, the National Post, and CBC News Calgary.

Source: The Line’s Naughty List: The demographic crisis isn’t going away 

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ICYMI: The number of study permits issued to Chinese students has significantly declined since 2018

2023/01/04 Leave a comment

Of note, the contrast between students from China and those from India and Philippines, the former in Canada for education purposes and the latter two pursuing shorter term programs as a pathway to permanent residence:

The number of Canadian study permits issued to students from China has dropped significantly since 2018, a period marked by a deteriorating diplomatic relationship and COVID complications, but China’s place as the top source of foreign university undergraduates has been only moderately diminished.

International tuition fees are crucial to the operation of Canada’s universities, which rely on the more than $6-billion that foreign students contribute annually in such payments.

Much of the decline in permits has been among students below the postsecondary level, where numbers have been down by about half over the past four years.

A little more than 52,000 study permits were issued to Chinese students through the end of October this year, according to new figures provided by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. That’s down from more than 90,000 in 2018. With two months of visa processing still to be tallied, it remains to be seen whether this year’s total will surpass the 62,000 visas issued in 2021 or mark a fourth straight year of decline.

In December, 2018, Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested while passing through Vancouver airport, and Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were jailed in China in apparent retaliation, sparking a diplomatic crisis.

There were concerns subsequently that China might encourage its students to study elsewhere, and thereby threaten a key source of Canadian university funding. A similar situation arose when Canada clashed with Saudi Arabia over human-rights issues and it pulled many of its students from Canadian schools.

Then, the pandemic further threatened to derail the educational link between the two countries, as severe lockdowns in China and uncertainty about the viability of in-person lectures in Canada hampered student movement.

Despite the upheaval of the past several years, China had more than 22,000 university undergraduate students approved for study permits in the first 10 months of this year. That’s down from more than 28,000 in 2018, but still the largest number for any single country. It also had 1,876 PhD student visas approved, up slightly compared with 2018.

There has also been a leap in study permits issued to students from Hong Kong, which are counted separately from those from mainland China. In 2022, more than 9,600 permits were issued to Hong Kong applicants, compared with just 2,600 in 2018.

The most significant growth in international students in recent years has been among students whose primary goal is a path to Canadian permanent residency. Those students, with the largest cohorts from India and the Philippines, tend to take shorter programs at the college level, rather than four-year university degrees.

India, which had 197,000 student visas approved, had just 12,700 permits (about 6.5 per cent of its total) at the university bachelor’s degree level. Still, the 80-per-cent growth in Indian student visas since 2018 is significant, and the numbers might have been even higher were it not for significant visa-processing delays over the summer.

The vast majority of Indian students are pursuing shorter schedules, which are less costly and include a pathway to a postgraduate work permit and permanent residency. More than 65 per cent of Indian students approved this year enrolled in college diploma or certificate programs, which are one- to two-year courses, with a further 7 per cent in university master’s programs of similar duration.

The Philippines also had a large share of students (about 60 per cent of 21,000) enroll at the college diploma or certificate level, compared with about 3 per cent at the university bachelor’s level.

Andre Jardin, associate registrar of admissions at the University of Waterloo, said the impact of the pandemic makes it difficult to judge the significance of any declines in Chinese university students. At the University of Waterloo, the number of students coming directly from China is down noticeably in recent years, in the range of a little more than 10 per cent, he said, but up a little this year compared with last year. There has also been an increase in the number of Chinese students entering after a year or two at a Canadian high school.

“For quite a few universities, China is still an overwhelming force, just based on population and a long history of sending students abroad,” Mr. Jardin said.

But it’s been three years since Waterloo and many other schools were in China recruiting in person, he said. Add the Chinese government’s message of caution around COVID-19 and uncertainty about whether classes would be delivered in person in Canada and it’s understandable to see some decline in the numbers, Mr. Jardin said.

“I would argue that this is still not the barometer year. We’re still in the midst of COVID response. I think next year will be a bit more the test. Will we see the trend line go back up or have the last few years changed things permanently?”

Source: The number of study permits issued to Chinese students has significantly declined since 2018

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ICYMI: Deep job cuts in Silicon Valley could bring tech workers back to Canada

2023/01/03 Leave a comment

We will see but certainly presents an opportunity:

A northern Silicon Valley success story has placed Canada in the midst of the sudden plunge in fortune for the tech sector, and the hundreds of thousands of Canadians whose skill and ambition made them coveted engineers, programmers and leaders.

More than 150,000 tech workers have been laid off this year, according to an online tally. The cuts have been wide and deep, slicing across companies, global offices and nationalities – Canadians included.

But could their losses be Canada’s gain? It’s a potentially critical question for the entrepreneurs and visionaries who see a moment for this country to find serendipity in grim times.

The dramatic change in Silicon Valley’s fortunes has created “opportunity for Canada to reclaim some of its talent,” said Jennifer Holmstrom, a Canadian who leads talent and recruitment for GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm.

For every job lost in California – or Seattle or Austin, Tex. – there is a chance “for Canadians to come back and for global talent to move here,” said Dan Burgar, co-founder of Frontier Collective, a Vancouver tech industry promotion group. In Canada, “we’ll start to see startups being actually being able to scoop up some of this talent.”

That, at least, is the dream for tech companies north of the border.

But the rounds of layoffs also stand to reaffirm the long-standing struggles for Canada’s tech industry in luring the country’s best and brightest. While Canadian tech has become an increasingly attractive option for foreign workers – a trend that has accelerated this year as U.S. layoffs take hold – for many Canadians, Silicon Valley remains a land of possibility whose glitter has only slightly dimmed in recent months.

When Trevor Lai left Toronto for a job in Seattle with Meta Platforms Inc., his salary quadrupled. Moving to the U.S. has come with its share of troubles. His fiancée has not been able to secure a work permit there. His own status has become tenuous, too, after he was laid off in early November, when Meta shed 13 per cent of its work force. “If I don’t find a job I will get kicked out of the U.S.,” he says.

But his first priority is to remain in the U.S. “Just because of the money,” he said. Even had he been able to transfer his job at Facebook to Toronto, he calculated that his income would have fallen by 40 per cent. “I’ve worked in several companies in Toronto,” he said. “The people there are amazing. Everything is awesome – except for the pay.”

At the same time, the tech layoffs have come during a year that has already seen a surge in skilled immigrants coming to Canada, and there are signs that job losses in the U.S. may accelerate movements north.

The 4,882 applications for immigration to Canada under the Global Talent Stream program from January to October of this year are up nearly 70 per cent over the total for last year – and a more than 10-fold increase over 2017, according to statistics provided to The Globe and Mail by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. The Global Talent Stream is open to people working in innovation-related companies, with a particular focus on tech workers, including computer and software engineers, information systems analysts, programmers and video-game designers.

Applications for Canadian work permits by Indian citizens in the first 10 months of this year are also up 40 per cent over last year, and more than triple the number from five years ago.

Indians hold nearly three-quarters of the H-1B visas granted by the U.S., a temporary work permit for specialized talent. They have been among the groups most seriously affected by tech layoffs, since H-1B visas are tied to employment. Those unable to find new jobs must leave the U.S. within 60 days.

Over the past decade of frenzied tech hiring and acute worker shortages, H-1B visa-holders could treat the threat of expulsion as theoretical. Tech layoffs have made that possibility unnervingly tangible.

Canada can be an appealing alternative. Major U.S. tech firms have already opened offices in Canadian cities, which have the added benefit of sharing time zones with their U.S. counterparts.

Last year, Canada counted more tech workers than California; the tech worker population in the Toronto-Waterloo corridor may soon eclipse that of the San Francisco Bay area. “If it hasn’t already happened, it will happen within the next 12 months,” said Chris Albinson, president of Communitech, the Kitchener, Ont.-based innovation hub.

“Canada is actually set up really well to be the largest innovation hub on the planet right now. What’s happening now in terms of the movement of tech workers out of the U.S. is going to do nothing but accelerate that benefit for Canada.”

In Silicon Valley, some have already prepared for this moment. The pandemic and Donald Trump’s presidency created enough fear that many Indian tech workers in Silicon Valley began filing immigration applications to Canada, said Sophie Alcorn, an immigration lawyer in the region. Today, “many have that as a backup option.” She estimates that between 5,000 and 15,000 H-1B visa holders have lost work in the last two months.

For many of those unable to find new jobs in the U.S., “if they can find a way to legally come to Canada, they would love that,” she said.

It’s not only those suddenly without work. MobSquad, which brings tech workers to Canada from the U.S. and elsewhere, has been hearing from software engineers who are “actually the ones that didn’t get laid off, that there’s interest in considering hopping to Canada,” said founder and chief executive Irfhan Rawji.

“We think it is going to create another pretty dramatic opportunity for the growth of our business, just like COVID did.”

It’s not clear how much that will address one of the biggest needs in Canada’s tech sector: a shortage of what Ray Newal, chief executive of The C100, a Canadian tech diaspora organization, calls “people who understand what ‘great’ looks like.” Those with experience working in and growing companies with $100-million and more in annual revenue are the people who can help build startups into global successes. Tech layoffs provide a new opening to recruit such people into smaller Canadian companies.

“Hopefully we’re going to see an opportunity to build more Shopify’s,” he said. To do that, however, will mean countering what he calls a “bifurcation of ambition,” where Canadians looking to do big things have traditionally looked outside the country.

“They don’t feel that their ambition can be met here,” he said. Reversing that is not “something we have figured out how to do well enough yet.”

Anyone leaving the U.S. has options that extend far beyond Canada, particularly with rise of digital nomadism. People are “going to want to work from Mexico, from Barbados, from Bermuda,” said Hongwei Liu, founder of Mappedin, a Waterloo-based company that maps indoor spaces. “If you can take your laptop and work from anywhere, why are you in Ontario?”

That question is a fundamental one not just for tech companies, but for Canada as a country. “We believe the biggest indicator of long-term success in the tech ecosystem is going to be talent,” said Jeff Larsen, the Atlantic Canada site lead for Creative Destruction Lab, which helps to develop seed-stage companies.

Mr. Larsen believes the question of how to attract talent is often approached wrongly. “It’s really creating the kind of community and city or region that people want to live in,” he said. Improving access to family doctors and transit may be more important than other measures.

Yet Canada has also seen enough tech success to make some ex-pat Canadians reconsider, especially as they weigh the political upheaval that has become part of life in places like the U.S. When Morley Ivers left Canada more than a decade ago, he found himself immediately at home as a tech entrepreneur in the U.S., where he became a citizen. “Being a founder was sort of recognized as someone who was living what people deemed was the American dream,” he said.

But, he said, “society inside of America has become so polarized that for me as a Canadian, quite frankly it became too much to bear.” He recently moved back to Toronto to create Cookin, a food delivery service for homemade meals. “I realized that the best place in the world for me to build in 2022 was Canada,” Mr. Ivers said. Toronto boasts not just cultural diversity, but “unbelievable tech talent – and it’s a fraction of the price.”

Others are leaving the U.S. in search of stability, including Indian citizens on H-1B visas who can wait decades to secure a green card. “I would call living on an H-1B in the U.S. like living on the edge,” said Syed Naqi, a software developer and project manager originally from New Delhi. He knows people who had to sell everything they owned – cars and houses included – after their status expired “and then rush back to India.”

When Mr. Naqi’s own H-1B visa was set to expire, MobSquad helped him move to Nova Scotia.

Within 18 months, he received permanent resident status in Canada. He now lives in Cole Harbour with his wife and two children. He describes his new community as warm and welcoming. He bought a house, and his family became fast friends with their next-door neighbours from Lebanon. His kids quickly adapted to a school system familiar after their time in the U.S.

“We like it here,” Mr. Naqi said. “Much better than in the U.S.”

Source: Deep job cuts in Silicon Valley could bring tech workers back to Canada

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ICYMI – Douglas Todd: Canada’s thirst for foreign-trained doctors leads to brain drain from poorer countries

2023/01/03 Leave a comment

Important consideration and a reminder of our largely self-interested immigration program:

It’s frustrating for many Canadians to lack access to a family physician.

And politicians understand the discontent.

That’s why B.C. Premier David Eby, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and others have been announcing they want to address the national health-care “crisis” by smoothing the way for potentially thousands of foreign-trained physicians to work in Canada.

However, while such a push will create some winners in Canada, there will be some losers: The people in countries that the physicians leave behind. Those who end up having to saying goodbye to the homegrown physicians their tax dollars paid to train tend to be in low- and moderate-income countries.

It’s an ethical dilemma, inherent in globalization, that virtually never gets mentioned in Canada.

The self-interest shown by Canadian politicians, and much of the public, in wooing offshore-trained physicians overrides the needs of the citizens of countries that produce them, which tend to have a far lower supply of doctors.

Of course, many internationally trained physicians are hungry for the chance to practise in Canada. One study showed 60 per cent of physicians taught in Pakistan, for instance, want to use their skills in another nation, with most citing how it would be more satisfying and lucrative.

The World Health Organization is trying to address the “geographic maldistribution” of health care workers.

It has developed a global protocol for the international recruiting of health personnel, which attempts to limit the often-detrimental effects of the brain drain. But while the WHO “strongly encourages” all nations to follow the code, it’s voluntary.

In effect, say some, needy countries that lose their health-care workers to places like Canada are providing an inadvertent aid program to richer nations.

It’s a poignant problem, including at a personal level. One of my friends, raised in Zimbabwe, trained as a physician in Africa, immigrated to Canada and had his abilities validated here. He rose high in medical ranks, offering his exceptional care to thousands of Canadians.

Recognizing his good fortune, he frequently returned to Africa to temporarily provide medical aid. Despite that, he was painfully aware he had, in effect, won the immigration lottery, which countless other Africans without adequate health care had not.

A major Canadian study of hundreds of foreign-trained physicians bluntly concludes: The “brain drain has obvious negative consequences” on low-income and middle-income countries.

The often-struggling nations not only lose crucial health-care workers, many of the migrating physicians themselves end up victims of so-called “brain waste,” according to the report led by the University of Toronto’s Aisha Lofters and others.

Since many foreign-trained doctors have run into far more barriers to actually practising medicine in Canada than they expected, they began to lose their skills and, when they returned to their homelands, were not as effective in providing health care.

While the survey was conducted before B.C. and Ontario promised this year to streamline the approval protocol, they authors of it warned “high-income countries like Canada need to ensure that the immigration process clearly outlines the relatively low likelihood of obtaining a career in medicine after immigration.”

The ideal, according to the World Health Organization, would be for all countries, rich and poor, to educate their own physicians and medical workers to meet their nation’s own needs. While the WHO doesn’t call for a ban on recruiting foreign-trained doctors, at the least it wants the process to be less misleading.

The issue of foreign-trained physicians ties into the larger challenge of the brain drain, which University of Oxford economist Paul Collier spells out in his book, Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World.

A specialist on Africa and other developing regions, Collier understands the complexities involved when rich nations welcome the most-educated inhabitants of poorer countries.

He starts with some upsides. One is that people who emigrate to a richer country often send money back home. Their remittances can be a huge benefit to left-behind families. That’s the case despite studies showing the wealthiest emigrants send home the least money.

In addition, says Collier, successful emigrants “become role models to emulate.” They encourage more people in their country of origin to aspire to an education. Since some of those newly educated people don’t end up departing their homelands, it can improve local economies.

A disturbing side-effect, however, is that when too many trained people leave poorer countries, it can cause governments to put less money into public schooling, Collier says. In an extreme case, Haiti, 85 per cent of the educated class have already departed, many for Quebec and Ontario.

Overall, the brain drain from poorer countries causes Collier to conclude the global case for compassion does not lean so much to Canadian citizens ending up, in large part because of population growth, without a family physician

The strongest moral onus, in many cases, is on rich countries to do more to educate people in poor countries who will stay home.

There are ways that could be done, separate from countries restricting how many people can leave. Delanyo Dovlo, the WHO’s representative to Rwanda, suggests all countries contribute to incentives, such as improved working conditions, to encourage health-care workers to practise in their home countries.

The WHO also emphasizes training more people to provide health care in rural areas, because they are less likely to migrate away. Lisa Nguyen, of the University of Washington’s medical school, maintains financial encouragement should be offered to expatriate physicians to return home.

In general, WHO offers the common sense advice that nations, including the likes of Canada, should “strive to meet their health personnel needs with their own human resources, as far as possible.”

Such national self-reliance might not be the cheapest route for governments, which will have to educate more doctors, but it points to a long-term solution.

Source: Douglas Todd: Canada’s thirst for foreign-trained doctors leads to brain drain from poorer countries

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ICYMI: Quebec suspends Entrepreneur and Self-Employed Immigration programs for non-Francophones

2023/01/03 Leave a comment

Of note. Unclear whether many who entered under these programs remained in Quebec or, like the investor program, ended up elsewhere:

Some entrepreneurs who are hoping to immigrate to the province by way of the Quebec Entrepreneur Program (QEP) and the Quebec Self-Employed Program (QSP) will have to change their plans.

As of December 28 the programs are no longer available to immigrants who speak English.

In a press release announcing the decision last week, Immigration minister, Christine Fréchette called it the first step in strengthening the permanent immigration of francophones to Quebec.

“To say that this will be yet another measure that would help protect the French language in the province is greatly disappointing and frankly shocking,” said immigration lawyer Marc-Andrée Séguin.

Only 75 non-French speaking applicants per year were selected. There is no such quota for francophones.

Winston Chen –who spearheaded the entrepreneur programs in 2018– was disappointed to hear the news.

“We are just cutting off the pool of talent of entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs,” Chen said. “Now is not the time. We also have a shortage of entrepreneurs and shortage of new companies.”

Immigration experts argue the decision will only hurt Quebec.

“What we want is to make sure that Quebec is at the top,” said Christine Poulin, an immigration consultant. “We need people, we want to attract people who work with the top.”

Susan Harris, an artist from New York, was planning to move to Montreal and eventually open her own gallery.

“This summer I bought a place in Montreal and started to know some of the people in the arts and go to the galleries and to the museums,” said Harris. “Every trip made me more happy and more excited about doing this.”

But Harris received a letter in the mail last week notifying her that her application would not be processed.

“I don’t see where my application for residency as a technically non-French speaking person is jeopardizing to anybody or certainly to the French culture,” said Harris who says she has been making every effort to learn and speak French.

Immigration experts fear people like Harris will settle in other provinces and say the immigration ministry could have gone about it differently.

“They could have absolutely made the certificate of selection conditional on these applicants actually demonstrating a proficiency in French,” said Séguin. “But they could make that requirement at the end of the process rather than at the beginning.”

Premier François Legault made it clear during his speech at the opening of the 43rd session of the National Assembly that stopping the decline of French in the province is one of his top priorities.

According to Legault, Francophone immigration will be vital to achieving that goal.

Source: Quebec suspends Entrepreneur and Self-Employed Immigration …

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

ICYMI – Green: No, immigration is not some magic pill for saving the economy

2023/01/02 1 Comment

Useful reminder…:

“When all you have is a hammer, all the world’s a nail.” This saying isn’t usually seen as a complimentary description of any policy approach but it appears to capture Canada’s immigration policy.

Immigration, undoubtedly, touches on nearly every aspect of our economy – from employment to output growth to health care to housing. And to hear the government speak, you would think it’s the right tool for the job in every one of them. The problem is, it’s at best an ineffective hammer for every one of them, and using it more will cause more problems than it will solve.

The size of the hammer is big and getting bigger. At the start of November, the federal immigration minister announced the new levels plan, taking Canada from receiving 405,000 permanent immigrants last year to 500,000 in 2025. Matching that is an expansion of the number of temporary foreign workers, to more than 770,000 in 2021 – almost double the high levels under the Harper government 10 years ago.

I am in favour of immigration at the levels of the recent past. But now the main argument made to ramp up immigration is that it will spur economic growth, and this is a tantalizing promise that turns out not to be true. Study after study after study shows that sudden expansions in immigration increase the size of the economy (the GDP) but don’t change GDP per person or the average wage – how well off people are. The research shows that immigration tends to lower wages for people who compete directly with the new immigrants (often previously arrived immigrants and low-skilled workers) and improves incomes for the higher skilled and business owners who get labour at lower wages. That is, it can be an inequality-increasing policy.

But isn’t this time different? Don’t we have such a high number of unfilled jobs that the economic machine is threatening to break down? First, the employment rate is now much higher than in the past and GDP per capita growth is strong. There is no evidence the machine is breaking down from lack of workers.

Second, the economy is not a machine that breaks down when parts are missing. It is an organic being that flows, guided by prices. If we didn’t bring in immigrants to match the vacancies, that does not necessarily lead to catastrophe.

When that happens, wages would have to increase to attract domestic workers. Some firms would not be able to pay the higher wages and might shut down or not undertake some projects. But those would be the least productive projects – the ones that don’t warrant the market wage. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the way markets work.

Immigration thus keeps wages down in occupations in high demand, and that reduces incentives for firms and workers already here to invest in the skills needed to fill those positions, reducing opportunities, missing an opportunity to increase the skill level of the work force and getting in the way of training and education policies intended to help workers with those opportunities.

Using immigration to solve the labour crunch therefore has the potential to weaken productivity and lower wages.

Linked to the argument about labour shortages is the aging of our population. The retirement of the baby boom will lead to substantial increases in the ratio of non-workers to workers over the next decade. Surely, bringing in more immigrants is the right solution to this? The answer is that it will help a little bit but immigrants aren’t that much younger than the people already living here, and adding 100,000 more immigrants a year won’t move the age dial enough to seriously alter the dependency ratio.

And while it’s not solving these problems, a jump in immigration will put strains on other parts of our economy and society. Adding 100,000 more immigrants a year will mean a big increase in people looking for housing in our cities each year, where the housing markets are already at the breaking point.

The government’s response to this most obvious of problems is that immigrant trades workers will fill shortages in construction trades, increasing housing production. But the construction sector isn’t grinding to a halt because of lack of workers – employment in the sector is already above 2019 levels and there is plenty of activity. The problem in housing supply is rooted in municipal regulations around density and offshore buyers treating our housing as an investment. Immigration won’t hit those nails. It will make problems worse. And when it does, it will put a strain on Canadians’ much vaunted immigration-welcoming attitudes.

Further strains on the health care system are also concerning. A case might be made for bringing in the front-line health workers our system needs now. But the current system underutilizes foreign-trained immigrants, and the problem lies with rigid professional associations, not with the federal government. Bringing in more health workers without solving this problem is unfair to the people we are bringing in, adding them to the large number of frustrated foreign-trained health workers already here. Again, increasing the numbers is not the solution to the problem.

Immigration is both necessary and positive. Immigrants make our society more vibrant. And the evidence is they don’t lower standards of living. But neither do they raise them. Labour markets are finally poised to give workers the wage gains they have been waiting for. Housing markets are straining. Blocking the first and worsening the second in pursuit of pounding nails that immigration doesn’t even hit well isn’t wise policy. A sudden jump without better preparing housing markets and creating mechanisms to integrate the new immigrants is irresponsible.

David Green is a professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and an international fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London.

Source: No, immigration is not some magic pill for saving the economy

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ICYMI: How Canada’s foreign-student boom is creating a host of problems

2023/01/02 Leave a comment

Good comments by Alex Usher of HESA, with money quote being “It’s untenable:”

Deepali Verma is nearing the end of her studies at Cape Breton University. She has taken just one class on campus.

Instead of going to lecture halls, she and hundreds of her peers in the university’s post-baccalaureate diploma programs have attended classes at a Cineplex movie theatre, before nightly showings of Top Gun: Maverick and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

The university has increased its intake of foreign students – so much, and so quickly, that it has run out of space on campus. During the recent fall semester, 90 courses in the post-baccalaureate programs were held at Cineplex, compared with 56 on campus and 20 online. About 2,680 students were enrolled in those programs. All but two were international students, and the vast majority – 86 per cent – came from India.

Ms. Verma, who is from New Delhi, is paying more than $27,000 in tuition and fees for her two-year education in business analytics. She isn’t pleased with the Cineplex arrangement. “I would say it’s disgusting,” she said.

That’s not the extent of students’ frustrations. Every day on social media, there are desperate pleas for housing in Sydney, N.S., a sleepy town of 31,000 that is trying to absorb a spike of newcomers caused by the university’s increased admissions. Quite often, incoming students days away from arriving in Canada still don’t know where they’ll live. Others complain about a public transit system that is buckling under rapid growth in ridership.

And these troubles are not unique to this corner of the Maritimes. Across the country, postsecondary schools have dramatically ramped up their admissions of foreign students, creating knock-on effects for their communities.

This has led to accusations that colleges and universities are gorging on international student fees while turning a blind eye to local challenges. Some critics are saying schools need to be reined in.

“You’re getting a lot of localized stresses that come from the fact that institutions don’t seem to care where their students live,” said Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a consulting firm. “They don’t care about the housing problems faced by the local community. They’re acting like bad neighbours.”

Colleges and universities control a major chunk of population growth. At the end of 2021, there were more than 620,000 study permit holders in Canada from abroad. Before the pandemic, which led to temporary border restrictions, their ranks jumped by 434,000 people over the course of a decade. That’s about the population of Halifax.

There is a simple explanation for the explosion: money.

Government funding of postsecondary schools has not increased in inflation-adjusted terms in nearly 15 years, while domestic enrolments have peaked, according to a recent report from Higher Education Strategy Associates. That has turned international students into a crucial, and expanding, source of revenue.

The average undergraduate tuition for international students at Canadian universities has nearly doubled over the past 15 years, after adjustments for inflation. Foreign students now pay five times more than their domestic peers; it used to be three times more.

“There is no sign yet that Canadian institutions are pricing themselves out of the market,” the report says.

It helps that colleges and universities are an integral part of the immigration pipeline. After graduation, foreign students can get multiyear work permits, which help them acquire Canadian job experience that is valuable in Canada’s points-based system for economic immigrants.

The eventual goal, for many students, is to gain permanent residency. And the federal government wants a lot more immigrants. Its goal is to admit 500,000 permanent residents annually by 2025. The country brought in slightly more than 400,000 last year. Around 150,000 of them had started their journeys in Canada as international students.

However, unlike the permanent residency program, there are no targets for study permit holders. Postsecondary schools can admit as many foreign students as they wish. Ontario colleges are notable for jacking up admissions numbers, Mr. Usher said.

“Can this be done better? Yes,” he said. “But it means actually not letting every institution decide for itself, whenever it wants to increase these numbers. It’s untenable.”

Around 21,000 beds will be added to student residences in the 24 largest domestic markets by 2025, according to a report from real estate consultants Cushman & Wakefield, published earlier this year. At recent rates of admissions growth, that would cover just a portion of the incoming wave of students.

This pushes more students into the private rental market, where they compete with other residents for a limited number of housing units in supply-starved cities.

“It’s not just international students having trouble finding housing. That has an effect on the local market,” Mr. Usher said. “And it’s a tax that institutions are placing specifically on low-income families in those communities.”

Ms. Verma moved from Sydney to Halifax in the fall semester, as part of a required co-op term. Now she can’t find a room back in Sydney. She may commute – a one-way drive of five hours or so – to her final two classes.

“There is literally no space out there. I can’t even express how we are feeling. It’s really terrible,” she said.

Gurwinder Singh, who has also taken the bulk of his recent classes at Cineplex, likens the situation to paying for an iPhone but getting a knock-off. “It just felt like discrimination against the international students,” he said.

Mr. Singh will be making the same journey as Ms. Verma for his final class. He is moving to Halifax with his wife, who can’t find a job in Sydney. He also hopes to find a job in Halifax, and wants to limit his time away. “I’m not going to lose extra dollars” by staying overnight near the university, he said.

Sara Asalya, founder of the Newcomer Students’ Association, said “the burden of high tuition fees” is the number-one concern she hears about from international students. They often work multiple jobs to make ends meet.

The federal government is making it easier for them to work. This fall, it temporarily removed a limit on their job hours. Now international students enrolled in full-time studies can work more than 20 hours a week off campus. The government has said the change will help employers, who have complained about a lack of workers.

“These government decisions are really coming at a time when the government is pressured to look at the labour shortage, more than looking at the actual experience of these students,” Ms. Asalya said.

“I don’t think we can continue to increase the intake, and lift the limit of hours, without building a proper infrastructure to support these students.”

Gordon MacInnis, Cape Breton University’s vice-president of finance and operations, said the school is dealing with a sudden rush of students, because many had to postpone their studies owing to pandemic-related border restrictions. The university had nearly 4,000 international students in the fall semester, an increase of roughly 1,600 (or 68 per cent) from the previous year, according to preliminary survey data from the Association of Atlantic Universities. Foreign students accounted for 72 per cent of CBU’s full-time enrolments, and their ranks have grown by more than 3,000 (or 343 per cent) in five years.

Even so, the fall spike caught the university off guard. “They all showed up more than we were anticipating,” Mr. MacInnis said. “This bubble will be with us for about two years,” he added, because foreign students are mostly enrolled in two-year programs.

Mr. MacInnis said CBU is not the first university to rent out movie theatres for lectures. It has spent money to retrofit those spaces for classes, he noted, and a shuttle bus will run between Cineplex and campus, starting in January.

Still, these are “stopgap measures,” he said. The goal is to invest in school infrastructure and eventually “repatriate” its staff and students to the main campus.

Starting in May, CBU will be limiting its intake of students in the post-baccalaureate programs to ease some of the pressures caused by the recent uptick in enrolments.

Nova Scotia recently announced it is investing $5-million in a CBU project to build hundreds of housing units in Sydney, although the development is years away from completion. In the interim, many students are feeling conflicted about their choice of university. Ms. Verma was initially smitten with the school and Sydney, which was so peaceful compared to her native New Delhi.

But her recent struggles – in particular, with finding a home – have left a bitter taste.

“I won’t recommend anybody to come to CBU right now, because I don’t want people to suffer or go through the same things that we are going through,” she said. “It’s really hard here.”

Source: How Canada’s foreign-student boom is creating a host of problems

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2022 in review and looking ahead: immigration and related issues

2022/12/22 Leave a comment

2022 was characterized, in many ways, by the failure of governments to anticipate and respond to changed circumstances. Whether it be backlogs in immigration, citizenship and passports, or the overall failure of governments to address pressures on housing, healthcare and infrastructure, virtually every level of government failed to some extent.

What has been encouraging has been greater public commentary on the need for governments to address these pressures (externalities) even if the most governments remain in denial or at least silent, with the current approach, across all governments save Quebec, being the “more the merrier,” both permanent and temporary residents.

As I recently argued, the government’s Annual Report on Immigration needs to include a discussion of these externalities as well as including temporary residents in its planning and targets.

I have continued my monthly updates of immigration-related programs and have been pleased to work with the Institute for Canadian Citizenship in making some of this data more easily accessible. Summary of the recovery across programs below, comparing January-October 2022 with full year 2018, showing already well ahead of 2018 in most programs.

Issues I expect to continue following are foreign interference by governments like China, Iran and Russia, exploitation of international students and ill-guided policies that make this more-and-more a lower-skilled immigration stream, the contrast between Ukrainian refugees and others, the ongoing federal-provincial immigration arguments over relative shares, and, of course, the evolution of public opinion on immigration-related issues.

It will also be interesting to see whether or not the the proposed class action lawsuit by Black public servants is allowed to proceed along with the complaint to the United Nations Commission for Human Rights. Whenever I look at the numbers (and will do so again in 2023), Black representation is relatively better than South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino for the EX category, and better than all other groups overall, although there are significant differences among the different occupations. 

The other broader development to watch will be the expected revision of the Employment Equity Act, an act that has, IMO, facilitated and resulted in increased diversity among designated groups.

Citizenship will remain a focus and I am still waiting for the revised citizenship study guide to be released (under the fourth immigration minister!). It will also be interesting to see if the government fulfills its campaign commitment in both the 2019 and 2021 elections to eliminate citizenship fees (that were increased 5 fold by the previous government). Given the current financial pressures, will be interesting to see if the government walks that commitment back, implement it in the forthcoming budget, or do nothing and assume no one will notice (not placing any bets but inaction is the most likely outcome).

I have requested a number of citizenship Census specialized data sets to allow me to update and track change compared to 2016, looking at variety of socioeconomic factors and outcomes.

Lastly, some good news, the complete switch of attitude among political leaders in Hérouxville, the small town that convulsed Quebec with its 2007 xenophobic code of conduct for immigrants, to welcoming immigrants given demographics. Overtime, will likely have broader reverberations and somewhat weaken the differences between Montreal and the regions.

Lastly, on a personal note, we became grandparents for the first time, welcoming a new life into our family.

Best wishes for the holidays and will restart up in January.

Article roundup

Citizenship 

Is birth tourism about to return now that travel restrictions have been lifted (Policy Options, 2022), my annual update, showing a further decline compared to pre-pandemic numbers, given the legacy of Canadian travel and Chinese government restrictions.

Disconnect between political priorities and service delivery (The Hill Times, 2022), commentary on a “missing link” between policy and service delivery/implementation.

Passport delays risk undermining our trust in government (The Star, 2022), op-ed on the passport delivery fiasco.

Immigration 

Has immigration become a third rail in Canadian politics? (Policy Options, 2022), my latest, arguing for improvements in the annual levels plan to incorporate temporary workers and include considerations of the externalities of housing, healthcare and infrastructure impacts.

Public opinion on migration could sour amid food insecurity and climate change (Policy Options, 2022), This commentary was developed in the context of a Ditchley conference on food insecurity.

How the government used the pandemic to sharply increase immigration (Policy Options, 2022) My analysis of the government’s actions.

Diversity and Employment Equity

Do MPs represent Canada’s diversity? (Policy Options, 2022) Written jointly with Jerome Black, this analysis confirmed ongoing increases in political representation.

Forthcoming articles early in the new year will look at the political impact of increased diversity at the federal riding level and a comparison of provincial government political representation for the last two provincial elections.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Francis: Justin Trudeau’s foolhardy immigration targets

2022/12/21 Leave a comment

Classic example when valid critiques of current immigration policy are limited by ideological blinkers and perspective.
Yes, the Trudeau government is wrong in its approach to immigration as I have argued repeatedly.
But all provinces save Quebec support the increased levels, as does the business community, both larger and smaller companies, along with the “immigration industry” of lawyers, consultants, settlement organizations and many if not most academics in the immigration space.
So rather than directing ire solely at the federal Liberal government, spread it around to more accurately reflect reality:
The Trudeau government aims to let in 465,000 immigrants next year, despite serious shortages in housing and health care. As a percentage of the population, this is higher than most other developed nations and comes at a time when the country faces mounting debt and is likely headed into a recession.
This demographic push began at a weekend gathering in 2011 in Muskoka, Ont., led by Dominic Barton, who served as global managing director of McKinsey & Company before becoming Canada’s ambassador to China for a time, and former BlackRock Inc. honcho Mark Wiseman. They then created a Toronto-based lobbying group called the Century Initiative, which aims to increase Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100. Given sagging birth rates, this would require Canada to accept at least 500,000 immigrants a year, if not more.

Source: Justin Trudeau’s foolhardy immigration targets

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