The federal government will at some point this year allow new citizens to skip the ritual of mass swearing-in ceremonies and instead let them take the citizenship oath alone at home, on a secure website, with no authorized individual overseeing them, simply by ticking a box on their computer screen.
It’s a move Ottawa says will help eliminate a backlog of 358,000 citizenship applications (as of last October), reduce by three months a processing time that can stretch two years – double the published service standard – and spare low-income working people the difficulty of taking an unpaid day off in order to be present at a ceremony.
It’s part of a broader government effort to accommodate a surge in citizenship applications. In a fractious world, a Canadian passport is increasingly desirable. Ottawa says applications more than doubled between fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2022, rising to 243,000 from 113,000.
With immigration surging under the Trudeau government to as high as 500,000 people a year, the demand is only going to keep growing. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is hoping to process 300,000 citizenship applications this fiscal year, a 34 per-cent increase over the previous year.
To do that, it has already moved the application process online. And it has made the oath of citizenship an almost entirely virtual experience. Of 15,457 swearing-in ceremonies involving 549,290 applicants since April, 2020, Ottawa says 15,290 were video calls.
And now the government wants to go one step farther and reduce the final step to becoming a Canadian – taking the oath of citizenship – to something akin to agreeing to the terms of service on a smartphone app.
That’s one step too far. While it is obvious that the case can be made to allow some applicants in urgent circumstances to take the oath online, gaining Canadian citizenship is too important to be voided of all ceremony for the sake of convenience.
Ceremonies and rituals matter. They unite communities around various milestones – momentous days on the calendar, births, graduations, marriages, anniversaries and deaths – and in doing so reinforce shared values.
The moment of becoming a new citizen is among those milestones. Arguably, gathering to mark it is as important as the taking of the citizenship oath itself.
For new Canadians, the ceremony signals the end of a long and at times arduous journey from emigration to permanent residency to taking the citizenship test to becoming a full citizen. It’s a chance to celebrate with friends and family. Many who’ve been through it will tell you how much it meant to them to sing the national anthem as a citizen for the first time, in a room surrounded by others like them.
The ceremony is just as important for the host country. An in-person ceremony is a chance for the federal government to show its appreciation for the people who’ve chosen Canada. It also serves as palpable recognition of the immense value that immigration holds for this country, and signals to those already here how welcome the newcomers are.
Above all, the in-person nature of the ceremony reinforces the idea of Canada as a community of people who share the same values – something that won’t happen in the cold isolation of the internet.
Ottawa absurdly hopes that its proposal will reduce the demand for in-person and online ceremonies (which will still be optional), and thereby save it a few dollars.
That is a robotic, unthinking cost-benefit analysis. So is Ottawa’s argument that its plan will cut a few months off the waiting time for taking the oath.
If Ottawa wants to speed up the citizenship process, it should find ways of doing it without eliminating the citizenship ceremony. It is trying to save a small amount of money at the expense of a critical moment of human connection.
Ottawa should instead limit the click-here-to-officially-become-a-Canadian option to specific exceptions. The same goes for the online video option. The government needs to get citizenship judges out of their basements and bring back the in-person ceremony for the vast majority of cases.
Canadian citizenship is precious. So is the willingness of people to seek it out.
These are things that deserve a sense of ceremony and grandeur. They should not be reduced to the equivalent of checking a box to add fries to your order.
Good focus on productivity and per capita GDP but limited concrete policy prescriptions to address productivity and no serious questioning of current levels of permanent and temporary residents:
Canadian and U.S. economic growth is diverging in a surprising away. As BMO chief economist Doug Porter pointed out in a memo last week, Canada’s overall growth is super-charged by immigration. But we have trailed U.S. per capita growth miserably in the past three years. Even though a bigger population will create a larger market here, the growing divergence in per capita incomes is bad news for Canada. Workers, savers and businesses will look elsewhere for better economic opportunities, and we won’t be growing fast enough to adequately serve a larger population demanding more in terms of housing, health care and pensions.
As Porter calculates, Canadian and U.S. annual GDP growth rates for the 12 years before 2020 were almost identical (at 1.72 and 1.66 per cent, respectively). Since the fourth quarter of 2019, however, Canada’s annual growth rate has fallen by a third, to 1.12 per cent, while the U.S. growth rate has stayed virtually the same — at 1.67 per cent — despite the pandemic.
Where the countries diverge is in the sources of their GDP growth. Canada’s comes entirely from population growth, which averaged 1.6 per cent per year over the past three years, including this year’s whopping 3.1 per cent. But GDP per working hour actually fell by 0.2 per cent per year over the last three years.
Despite large-scale illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is reported in U.S. population figures, American population growth was only 0.5 per cent per year since 2020, the lowest it has been in a century. Most U.S. GDP growth came from labour productivity, which grew by 1.4 per cent a year. U.S. GDP per capita, at US$76,400 is already two-fifths greater than Canada’s US$55,300 — with both expressed in “purchasing-power parity” dollars. The current gap in per capita growth rates implies American per capita income will be twice ours in 2050.
That raises two key questions. Will our policy to supercharge immigration lead to better productivity so Canada won’t lag so badly? And do we need other policies to increase the economic gains from immigration?
As leading U.S. immigration expert George Borjas concluded in a 2019 paper, the effect of immigration on productivity is actually uncertain. Continued large-scale immigration will result in lower wages and falling average labour productivity as firms take on workers rather than invest in capital to improve productivity. On the other hand, a larger pool of skilled labour, successful assimilation into the workforce and beneficial long-term fiscal impacts could lead to productivity improvements over time.
Canada has done a remarkable job integrating immigrants, who are now 23 per cent of the population. Sixty per cent of Canada’s immigrants are “economic,” with a focus on skilled-based immigration. Almost 95 per cent are under the age of 65, are likely to work and do help create a larger pool of workers. Within 10 years, landed immigrants have similar incomes and unemployment rates as the rest of the population — even if in their first five years they have double the unemployment rate of the general population.
Immigration is therefore like an investment, with good economic returns in the long run but potential upfront costs providing housing, health care, education and other services to new Canadians. Most immigrants gravitate to big cities where housing prices are highest: 44 per cent settle in Ontario and roughly 15 per cent each in British Columbia and Alberta. With Quebec’s restrictions on immigration, its share has fallen to 15 per cent even though it still has more than a fifth of Canada’s population.
My second question is whether other policies could help us exploit the potential productivity gains from a larger population.
In theory, a larger Canadian market does provide opportunities for businesses to achieve economies of scale in production. In practice, however, barriers to inter-provincial trade and capital and labour mobility make realizing these gains difficult. By relaxing accreditation standards, some provinces are having success bringing in the extra health professionals our ailing Medicare system so badly needs. But far more needs to be done to attract both white-collar and blue-collar workers.
Dumping refugees on Toronto streets is not much help. In cases I know of, Customs and Immigration have been terribly slow to process landed immigrant applications — sometimes to the point of forcing immigrants to reapply. The federal government, whose workforce has swollen by an unbelievable 40 per cent since 2015, needs to improve its own labour productivity and provide better, hassle-free service to more Canadians.
And then there is Canada’s pathetic investment performance. Without an expanding business sector, labour productivity stalls and unit costs rise, hurting competitiveness. As we are unlikely to build homes fast enough to meet the high demand for them in our cities, housing prices seem bound to continue to rise. With recent interest rate hikes and no reform of regulation, it’s not surprising that Statistics Canada reports real residential investment dropped nine per cent May over May, seasonally adjusted, while real non-residential investment in structures has barely changed this past year.
To make a bigger-population growth strategy work, we need to do more than just welcome immigrants at airports. We need to get our act together and speed up workforce integration, reduce barriers to mobility and encourage business investment.
Garry Keller recalls the first images passport staff brought before the then-Conservative government for consideration during the last major passport overhaul.
“We laughed,” Keller recalls. “It looked like a C-minus effort.”
The original concepts featured a Canada goose, a beaver and a maple leaf — ideas the government found uninspired and “lowest-common denominator.”
Keller served as chief of staff to John Baird, who oversaw the passport redesign as foreign minister. Baird and his team sent the department back to the drawing board.
“I think we delivered a passport that was certainly esthetically beautiful in the inside, but also pulled from the historical story of Canada,” Keller said.
When he saw the latest redesign of the Canadian passport unveiled last May, he said it reminded him of those early concept images.
Canadiansmight never know what ideas were considered and rejected before the federal government finalized the reimagined and often lambasted design for the passport.
When a request for earlier proposed versions under the Access to Information Act turned up no result, the Immigration Department said draft artwork for the new passport wasn’t stored for security reasons, since the artwork is considered a security feature in and of itself.
“Due to the classified nature of the passport design during its development, (Government of Canada) restrictions on the storage and communication of classified information and the difficulties of operating during pandemic restrictions, the passport program does not store information concerning drafts of the passport design,” the department said in an emailed response to the information request.
The government doesn’t even own the early drafts or proposals since they were produced by an outside contractor, the department clarified in a later statement.
The department said the esthetic and thematic content in the passport serve solely as a support for what they call “secure line work.”
“Security features and the artwork therefore cannot be dissociated,” the department said.
Experts say the design is sure to have gone through several iterations before the Liberals landed on what critics have called a generic document that rejects the previous historic motif.
The theme was first identified more than 10 years ago and approved in 2020 after much consultation, the Immigration Department said in a statement Friday. Only one theme was approved for consideration and developed into a design, the department said.
“The esthetic design must be completed at the beginning of the process to feed the downstream steps mentioned above,” the statement read.
The final version features new security measures and stylized artwork.
Historic images representing Canada’s past have been replaced with pastel tableaus of Canadian life and fauna on the visa pages.
On one page, children in colourful parkas build a snowman outside a barn while a snowy owl looks on. On another, a boy appears frozen mid-jump off a dock as canoeists paddle by.
Under ultraviolet light, the owl takes flight and the boy splashes into the lake.
The result sparked instant controversy, with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accusing the Liberals of injecting their “woke ideology” into the passport design.
The Royal Canadian Legion expressed disappointment that an image of the Vimy Memorial in France would no longer be featured in the passport, calling it a “poor decision.”
The Terry Fox Hometown Run also expressed regret that Fox’s Marathon of Hope run won’t be honoured in the pages of the passport anymore.
“I think it’s important to say that this is not partisan,” Social Services Minister Karina Gould said at a press conference at the Ottawa International Airport in May, standing before poster boards of the new designs.
“The design of this passport started 10 years ago and this is really about ensuring the security of the document.”
The passport goes through a major overhaul every 10 years or so and changing the artwork — an element deemed a novelty a decade ago — is considered part of the anti-counterfeiting effort.
In 2012, when the historical images were first introduced, they replaced identical visa pages that featured a large red Maple Leaf surrounded by smaller blue maple leaves.
The immigration department said none of the alternative concept images from the 2012 redesign were kept either.
The images in the 2012 passport were part of a governmentwide rebrand that was underway when the Conservatives came to power, said Alex Marland, the Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership at Acadia University.
The Conservatives “were obsessed with co-ordinating government so that it could be communicating variations of the same message in different ways that were very much connected to the party’s messaging,” Marland said in an interview.
While most people would hope government decisions are made in a non-partisan way, the reality is that government is politicized all the time, he said.
This time around, the passport resign was underway at the same time as a polarized debate over certain aspects of Canada’s history.
Many have questioned whether monuments to Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, should continue to stand, given his role in the establishment of residential schools.
The Liberal government also tends to take a different approach to projects like the passport, and usually opts to rely heavily on focus groups, Marland said.
“It’s very different than the Harper Conservatives, which (were) far more ideologically focused,” he said.
The government consulted with several federal departments, Indigenous groups, and others, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said at the presentation of the new design.
“One of the things that we heard is that we want to celebrate our diversity and inclusion, we want to celebrate our natural environment … and try to bake those elements into the design,” he said.
“But to be absolutely clear, we’re extremely proud of Canada’s history.”
For his part, Marland said it would have been in the public interest to release any concept designs that were part of those consultations.
Canadians will soon see the final design, expected to go into circulation this summer.
Of note, an egregious example of DEI training run amok and a cautionary tale regarding engaging American DEI consultants:
In late April, 2021, a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainer named Kike Ojo-Thompson presented a lecture to senior Toronto public-school administrators, instructing them on the virulent racism that (Ojo-Thompson believes) afflicts Canadian society. Canada, she said, is a bastion of “white supremacy and colonialism,” in which the horrors unleashed by capitalism and sexism regularly lay waste to the lives of non-white and female Canadians.
Anyone who lives in Canada knows this to be a preposterous claim. But in the wake of the George Floyd protests, which opportunistic DEI entrepreneurs in Canada treated as a gold rush, such lies have been treated as unfalsifiable. The same is true of the (equally preposterous) claim that Canada’s experience with anti-black racism directly mirrors that of the United States. And so it was expected that Ojo-Thompson’s audience would simply nod politely and keep their mouths shut until her jeremiad had concluded.
But one audience member refused to submit: Richard Bilkszto, a long-time principal at the Toronto District School Board who’d also once taught at an inner-city school in upstate New York. Having worked on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, he told Ojo-Thompson that her generalizations about the two countries seemed misguided; and that denouncing Canada in such a vicious manner would do “an incredible disservice to our learners.”
Bilkszto’s descriptions of Ojo-Thompson’s presentation (a recording of which was verified by at least one Canadian journalist) suggest that she is indeed quite ignorant of both American and Canadian history. Her claim that Canada’s monarchist tradition marks it as more racist than the United States is particularly absurd, given that the British outlawed slavery decades before both Canada’s creation and the U.S. Civil War.
National Post columnist Jamie Sarkonak describes what happened after Bilkszto began speaking up:
“Ojo-Thompson is described to have reacted with vitriol: ‘We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people?’ Bilkszto replied that racism is very real, and that there’s plenty of room for improvement—but that the facts still show Canada is a fairer place. Another KOJO training facilitator [KOJO Institute is the name of Ojo-Thompson’s company] jumped in, telling Bilkszto that ‘if you want to be an apologist for the U.S. or Canada, this is really not the forum for that.’ Ojo-Thompson concluded the exchange by telling the class that ‘your job in this work as white people is to believe’—not to question—claims of racism.”
This is not a unique story. I have reported for Quillette on other instances in which audience members have been smacked down for raising their voices when confronted with this kind of diatribe. It is part of the pattern of hypocrisy that surrounds the DEI industry more generally: While these consciousness-raising sessions are typically conducted on the conceit of teaching participants to be “brave” and ”disruptive,” the well-paid corporate trainers who lead them often demand a climate of craven subservience.
Ojo-Thompson didn’t confine herself to rebuking Bilkszto in that moment. She also allegedly attacked Bilkszto in a subsequent lecture as exemplifying the forces of white supremacist “resistance.” In Ojo-Thompson’s view, her original treatment of Bilkszto had presented everyone with a valuable template for how they should respond when “accosted by white supremacy.”
For his part, Bilkszto responded by suing the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) for harassment. He also sought a TDSB investigation of Ojo-Thompson’s actions, which the school board refused to conduct. But Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) took the incident more seriously, determining that Bilkszto was owed seven weeks of lost pay due to the mental stress he’d endured.
The WSIB judgment, later obtained by the National Post, concluded that Ojo-Thompson’s behaviour “was abusive, egregious and vexatious, and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying,” and that she’d intended to “cause reputational damage and to ‘make an example’” of Bilkszto.
I spoke with Bilkszto several times over the last two years, and he would often email me stories about other Canadians who’d been targeted as heretics. He took a leading role in a group of Toronto educators looking to address the problem of ideological extremism, and brought me in once as a guest speaker in late 2021.
Although Bilkszto and I never met (this was still the COVID era, when almost every meet-up was done over Zoom), we quickly bonded over our shared principles, both of us being traditional urban liberals who’d become concerned by the social-justice fanaticism that now suffused the TDSB.
Yet nothing in my own experience allowed me to fully comprehend the pain that Bilkszto was experiencing. A political progressive who’d devoted more than two decades of his life to the TDSB, Bilkszto never fully recovered from being falsely smeared as a supporter of white supremacy in front of his peers.
This month, Bilkszto, aged 60, committed suicide. I don’t know if he left a note. But according to his family, his suicide related to the false accusations of racism he’d endured in April 2021.
Bilkszto was particularly devastated by the fact that some of his TDSB bosses, whom he’d naively expected to defend him (or at least have the courtesy to say nothing at all), eagerly piled on with the public shaming meted out by their external DEI consultant.
On Twitter, Sheryl Robinson Petrazzini, then the TDSB’s Executive Superintendent, thanked Ojo-Thompson and her KOJO colleague for “modelling the discomfort [that] administrators”—i.e., Bilkszto—“may need to experience in order to disrupt ABR [anti-Black racism].”
For good measure, Robinson Petrazzini also suggested that Bilkszto (whom she did not name, but was the obvious subject of her Tweet) was allied with the forces of “resistance” to anti-racism, and so was abetting “harm to Black students and families.”
Bilkszto personally asked Robinson Petrazzini to delete the Tweet. She did so only eight months later, and only after receiving a letter from Bilkszto’s lawyer warning her that she’d be sued unless she did so.
According to Bilkszto, his other bosses also refused to support him, instead attacking him for his “male white privilege.” And yet, once Bilkszto filed a lawsuit against the TDSB, seeking $785,000 damages for the emotional and reputational harm he’d endured, those same administrators now began claiming that it was Ojo-Thompson who’d gone rogue.
While they’d been perfectly happy to throw Bilkszto under the bus when the stakes were confined to emotional “discomfort,” the TDSB suddenly decided to sue Ojo-Thompson for negligence and breach of contract, demanding that she effectively indemnify the school board for any payout that might become due to Bilkszto. (The TDSB later claimed that it planned to discontinue this suit. But Sakornak reported that it was still a going concern as of June 6.)
I live in Toronto, where my own children have all passed through TDSB schools. Their experience has been a positive one, and I’m happy with the education they’ve received, notwithstanding the sometimes excessive pedagogical focus on race and genderwang. In fact, I have come to sympathize with the teachers—most of them smart hard-working people who find themselves being pressured by their own unions and administrators to adopt militant social-justice postures in their classrooms.
In some school boards, moreover, professional advancement is limited to those who explicitly embrace “anti-racist, high anti-oppressive” leadership principles. So while social-justice puritans comprise a small minority at most schools, they are able to exert disproportionate power in their bid to censure, humiliate, or even oust colleagues, such as Bilkszto, who speak up for the silent majority. In some cases, these ideological enforcers work closely with local race activists and their media allies, so as to harass or censor educators and parents accused of wrongthink.
While the work of anti-racism careerists such as Ojo-Thompson and TDSB Director of Education Colleen Russell-Rawlins is often justified as a righteous crusade against the forces of privilege, it would be difficult to find a more privileged clique of professionals in the field of Canadian public education.
Prior to getting her $300K-per-year TDSB gig, for instance, Russell-Rawlins served as the anti-racism czar at the (even more dysfunctional) neighboring Peel District School Board. Since coming to the TDSB, she’s presided over a series of embarrassing scandals, including an aborted student census that was discovered to be full of overt social-justice propaganda, a revamping of specialty schooling that was found to have been based on a plagiarized research report, and the cancellation of a speaking event by a Nobel-winning ISIS survivor on the grounds that it might be seen as Islamophobic. She’s blithely sailed through all of this without suffering any career repercussions.
The same is true of Robinson Petrazzini, the former $200K/year TDSB superintendent who went on Twitter to spike the football when Bilkszto was humiliated by Ojo-Thompson. Shortly after Bilkszto lawyered up, Robinson Petrazzini became Director of Education at the neighbouring Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board.
As for Ojo-Thompson, she continues to be feted by numerous Canadian organizations and media outlets. In 2022, she served on the board of directors of Parents of Black Children, a Toronto-area lobby group that’s made a name for itself largely by urging school boards to implement the same anti-racism instructional modules that constitute Ojo-Thompson’s own stock-in-trade. (Her partner Rohan served until recently as Workplace Equity Manager with the Peel District School Board, and the two would appear together on stage to talk about “the Impact of Systemic Racism on K-12 Workplace Well-Being.”) The market for the sort of militant anti-racist diatribes that Ojo-Thompson peddles seems inexhaustible within Canada’s corner offices, and I seriously doubt whether even the negative attention resulting from Bilkszto’s death will dent her income.
And in any case, she’s been through this before—for this was not the first time that Ojo-Thompson has encountered “resistance”: A 2021 diversity training session that she delivered to councilors of Sarnia, a small Ontario city on the shores of Lake Huron, reportedly sparked a revolt among some audience members, causing Ojo-Thompson to quit that gig in a huff.
“The undisputed, uncorrected, and unabated hostility demonstrated by some members of Council toward our Principal Consultant Kike Ojo-Thompson was wholly inappropriate,” declaimed the KOJO Institute’s director of client services, Craig Peters. “There were things that were said in that meeting—that we won’t divulge—that led us to believe that it wasn’t in the organization’s best interest to continue.”
When contacted by The Sarnia Journal, Ojo-Thompson added that the comments she’d heard had made her feel unsafe.
“Safety isn’t always physical,” said Ojo-Thompson. “There is emotional and mental harm that can be done.”
No doubt, Richard Bilkszto (1963-2023) would agree.
Good column in Le Devoir (only commentary to date in French media that I have seen):
La fête du Canada ne se déroule pas de la même façon partout au pays. À l’extérieur du Québec, dans la plupart des communautés, les cérémonies de prestation du serment de citoyenneté sont organisées dans le cadre des célébrations locales planifiées pour accueillir des immigrants récents dans la grande famille canadienne. Ces cérémonies, remplies d’émotion et de patriotisme, servent à rappeler aux natifs du Canada la chance qu’ils ont d’être nés ici. Certes, des cérémonies de prestation ont aussi lieu au Québec. Mais elles sont rarement aussi médiatisées que dans le reste du Canada, où les journaux et les bulletins de nouvelles télévisés en parlent abondamment.
Beaucoup d’experts en immigration considèrent que la cérémonie de prestation du serment constitue une étape indispensable dans la formation de tout bon citoyen et dans la création, chez ces nouveaux venus, d’un sentiment d’appartenance au Canada. En 2021, le serment a été modifié afin d’inclure une obligation de la part des nouveaux citoyens de reconnaître et de respecter les droits ancestraux issus des traités signés avec les peuples autochtones, en conformité avec l’une des recommandations de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation. « Le serment de citoyenneté du Canada est un engagement envers ce pays — et cela comprend le projet national de réconciliation », avait expliqué le ministre de l’Immigration de l’époque, Marco Mendicino.
Les nouveaux Canadiens doivent aussi jurer d’être fidèles au roi Charles III. Contrairement à l’Australie, qui a modifié son serment de citoyenneté en 1994 pour enlever toute référence à la Couronne britannique, le Canada continue d’exiger que les nouveaux venus promettent d’être loyaux au locataire du palais de Buckingham. En 2015, la Cour suprême du Canada a refusé d’entendre l’appel de trois résidents permanents qui avaient prétendu que l’obligation de prêter serment au monarque violait leurs droits à la liberté d’expression et de religion. Ils avaient été déboutés devant la Cour d’appel de l’Ontario, qui avait déclaré que la référence au monarque était purement « symbolique », celle-ci évoquant notre « forme de gouvernement et le principe non écrit de démocratie » qu’il sous-tend.
Or, voilà qu’Ottawa s’apprête à permettre aux résidents permanents de prêter leur serment de citoyenneté en cliquant simplement sur une case en ligne sur le site Web d’Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada (IRCC). Plus besoin de prononcer le serment à voix haute devant un juge. Cliquez ici, et vous deviendrez Canadien.
La proposition, dont on n’a presque pas parlé au Québec, a créé un tollé ailleurs au Canada. « L’idée selon laquelle le Canada, qui est peut-être le pays au monde ayant eu le plus de succès en matière d’immigration, pourrait recourir à un moyen automatisé pour dire “vous êtes maintenant citoyen” est odieuse », a déclaré plus tôt cette année l’ancienne gouverneure générale du Canada Adrienne Clarkson, elle-même arrivée au pays comme réfugiée en 1942. L’ancien maire de Calgary Naheed Nenshi, fils d’immigrants musulmans d’origine tanzanienne, tout comme l’ancien ministre libéral de l’Immigration Sergio Marchi, né en Argentine, ont dénoncé publiquement la démarche d’Ottawa.
Andrew Griffith, un ancien haut fonctionnaire à IRCC, a même lancé une pétition — parrainée par le député conservateur Tom Kmiec, lui-même immigrant polonais — qui somme le gouvernement de Justin Trudeau de « renoncer à permettre l’auto-administration du serment de citoyenneté » ainsi que de « rétablir la primauté des cérémonies en personne et de réduire à 10 % la proportion de cérémonies virtuelles ». Ces dernières ont pris leur envol durant la pandémie. Mais certains experts, comme M. Griffith, croient qu’elles ne devraient se substituer aux cérémonies en personne qu’en cas d’exception.
La continuation postpandémie des cérémonies virtuelles tout comme la proposition de permettre l’auto-administration du serment sont des réponses aux arriérés à IRCC. Le ministère n’arrive plus à traiter les demandes d’immigration et de citoyenneté dans des délais raisonnables. Des résidents permanents approuvés pour devenir citoyens doivent attendre environ 19 mois avant d’être convoqués à une cérémonie de citoyenneté.
Le ministre de l’Immigration, Sean Fraser, vise à réduire l’attente en autorisant l’option de l’auto-administration. Mais M. Griffith se demande si une partie du problème ne découle pas du fait que les seuils d’immigration sont déjà trop élevés pour l’appareil gouvernemental. Plus de 1,2 million de nouveaux résidents permanents sont arrivés depuis trois ans, alors qu’Ottawa cherche à hausser le seuil annuel à 500 000 ou plus dès 2025. Si la plupart de ces nouveaux résidents permanents ont pour objectif de devenir des citoyens canadiens, l’auto-administration du serment deviendra incontournable. IRCC peine déjà à répondre à la demande. Imaginez ce que sera la situation dans cinq ans.
Ce n’est là qu’une des raisons pour lesquelles la politique d’immigration du gouvernement semble déconnectée de la réalité. Dans une étude publiée cette semaine, l’économiste chez Desjardins Randall Bartlett avance qu’il faudra encore plus d’immigrants pour contrer les effets du vieillissement de la population canadienne dans les années à venir. Mais il ajoute un gros bémol. « Comme la croissance démographique continue de faire grimper les prix des maisons et de miner l’abordabilité à court terme, le gouvernement fédéral doit tenir compte de cette situation dans sa politique d’immigration, en particulier en ce qui concerne les résidents non permanents. Sa politique d’immigration doit s’accompagner d’actions immédiates pour augmenter l’offre de logements. » Or, rien n’indique qu’Ottawa s’apprête à agir en ce sens.
Après tout, on ne peut pas construire des maisons en un clic.
An activist, linking citizenship to her “white saviour complex” perspective or ideology, largely disconnected from how the vast majority of immigrants feel about the ceremony who consider it a celebration, not just a “mandatory administrative task.”
Her reasoning essentially extends the government’s proposals to its logical conclusive, purely an administrative procedure to provide security and facilitate travel, with no impact on inclusion and sense of belonging. While anecdotes and the imperfect evidence we have suggests the opposite.
On the oath, of course, she has a point.
One of the better reader views in the comment section:
Can a feeling of national belonging be delivered with just a click of a mouse? That’s the question at the heart of the controversy around Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s plan to allow new citizens to tick a box online rather than take a verbal or in-person oath. The aim, the government says, is to reduce the backlog and simplify processing.
But a former senior immigration official has presented a petition to the minister, calling for Ottawa to revert to in-person citizenship ceremonies as the default, arguing that they “provide a unique celebratory moment for new and existing Canadians.” The more than 1,000 signatories worry that one-click citizenship will undermine new Canadians’ sense of belonging, as in-person ceremonies are meant “to enhance the meaning of citizenship as a unifying bond for Canadians.”
I too was excited for my own citizenship ceremony, having seen many colourful and happy pictures of Mounties, members of Parliament and a burst of Canadian flags before my day arrived. The reality, though, was underwhelming: an assembly-line process and a boring speech in a staid government building, followed by an oath to a monarch, before we were rushed out so the next batch of new Canadians could be shepherded in. There were no Mounties or MPs, as is the case with the majority of such ceremonies, making it less celebratory and more administrative.
I felt greater elation when I finally held my passport in my hands. The Ethiopian guard at the passport office gave me a knowing smile as he saw me holding back my tears. I’ll always remember that smile. The ceremony, not so much.
But both approaches – the “one-click” and the in-person – are problematic in the context of today’s immigration regimes. One reason is that these “ceremonies” often feel like expressions of a white-saviour complex, by which all systems in former colonial countries – even ones that have become more diverse, like Canada – are influenced by their white colonizer origins: it is the white-saviour host that decides who gets in, when and how. In a postcolonial world, the assumption within the host society is still that anyone seeking a new life here will be “saved”, but only if it deems it appropriate. This attitude is more about making the host country feel good, than it is about the significant sacrifices that immigrants must make in creating a new life for themselves.
We should celebrate the culmination of what is often a hard journey from permanent residency to citizenship. But when the celebration denies the daily reality of the lives of racialized Canadians and the discrimination they face, an hour-long state-sponsored festivity is hardly a solace in the long run.
The oath is also controversial. Much has been said about how it reaffirms a monarchy that engaged in destructive colonial practices in Canada and around the world. Many Canadian immigrants come from such former colonies. Why should they have to profess loyalty to Britain’s hereditary leaders?
And the notion of belonging that is at the core of citizenship means different things to different people. What those objecting to the one-click approach may not realize is that immigrants have to take the oath to receive our passports. As such, it doesn’t feel like a celebration – it feels like a mandatory administrative task. That the government is suggesting digitizing the oath also confirms this; that approach may help simplify IRCCs bureaucratic complexities, but why even include it, if its value is largely superficial?
Canada’s immigration policies, procedures and practices are hardly perfect; they have faced flack for their modern-day inefficiencies, historical discrimination and the department’s self-admitted racial bias. While Ukrainian refugees have been able to enter Canada quickly, with a fast-track for citizenship, the same cannot be said for Afghans, Syrians or Haitians also fleeing conflict, but made to wait in life-threatening circumstances, or left without any shelter or support on the streets of Canada. In this context, it feels almost impossible to celebrate.
There is actually no need for a ceremony, or even a symbolic oath of citizenship, verbally or through a click; we become citizens once we have cleared the highly cumbersome administrative process. By that point, new Canadians have paid their dues, with interest, to prove we belong in this country, and most of us do it with genuine respect because we see Canada as our home. Celebrating that sacrifice and achievement doesn’t happen in a citizenship ceremony or with an oath. Instead, it would be more worthwhile to focus on a more pragmatic, inclusive and equitable approach to immigration in Canada.
Themrise Khan is an independent policy researcher in global development and migration, and the co-editor of White Saviorism in International Development. Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences.
The federal government has shifted its immigration policy by recruiting thousands of foreign nationals to settle permanently in Canada in hopes they will fill specific jobs, a strategy that has drawn criticism from labour experts.
Since late June, the immigration department has invited almost 9,000 people to apply for permanent residency because of their recent work experience in certain occupations or because of their French-language skills. These individuals are being selected through the Express Entry system, which accounts for a large portion of economic immigration to Canada.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said last year that it would target immigrants who could fill roles in high demand. On May 31, the department announced it would focus on French speakers and people with experience in five fields: health care, skilled trades, agriculture, transportation and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).
Within health care, for example, the government is seeking immigrants with experience in 35 occupations, including dentists, massage therapists and registered nurses.
The government says its pivot to category-based selection of immigrants, which started on June 28, is meant to ease the hiring challenges that have frustrated many sectors of the economy over the past few years.
But this new approach has raised concerns among economists and policy experts, who warn that today’s labour needs could change quickly and leave the country with a glut of workers in some fields. Moreover, they say high-ranking candidates in Canada’s points-based immigration system could get overlooked as Ottawa prioritizes various groups.
Labour markets “are always evolving and changing,” said Robert Falconer, a doctoral fellow at the London School of Economics who studies migration policy in Canada. “We’re potentially overtargeting certain needs.”
Canada’s labour market is undergoing a transition. While employment has risen by a net 290,000 positions so far this year, job vacancies have tumbled about 20 per cent from their peak levels in 2022. The unemployment rate, now at 5.4 per cent, has risen half a percentage point from a record low set last year.
In some areas, there appears to be persistently high demand for labour. As of April, there were more than 150,000 vacant jobs in health care and social assistance, a record high – almost a fifth of all job vacancies in Canada.
These labour gaps “are just going to get worse as the population ages,” said Rupa Banerjee, a Canada Research Chair in immigration and economics at Toronto Metropolitan University. “Targeting those kinds of occupations has the potential to improve this mismatch” in labour supply and demand.
But in some white-collar industries, there has been a steep drop in vacancies. For example, job postings in software development have plummeted to below prepandemic levels on the hiring site Indeed Canada. (Software developers are among the STEM roles being targeted by the government.)
“We don’t know if the targets that are set today will really be indicative of the needs that we’ll have in five years’ time,” Dr. Banerjee said.
She noted that category-based selection echoes a situation in the late 1990s, when the government admitted thousands of technology workers during a boom period in that industry. Shortly afterward, the dot-com crash led to significant layoffs.
To date, IRCC has invited 8,600 people to apply for permanent residency over five rounds. Two of those rounds targeted French speakers, another two focused on candidates with recent work experience in health care occupations and one focused on STEM experience.
This is a departure from how Express Entry usually works.
Immigration candidates in the Express Entry pool are assigned a score through the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS), accounting for such factors as age, education and employment history. The score corresponds to their expected Canadian earnings, based on the outcomes of previous cohorts of immigrants.
In the past, Ottawa would select a few thousand people with the highest scores every two weeks to apply for permanent residency. Policy experts likened this to a “cream-skimming” approach that would boost economic outcomes by targeting people with the highest earnings potential.
But in selecting people with certain attributes, the government is reaching deeper into the pool – and those individuals, with lower CRS scores, have lower expected earnings.
Last week, for example, IRCC invited 3,800 people in the French-language category to apply. The cut-off score for an invite was 375 – much lower than usual.
“It’s analogous to a university prioritizing other considerations, such as athletic ability or legacy status, in their student selection,” said Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo, via e-mail. “The inevitable trade-off is lower average academic quality of new admissions.”
IRCC is still selecting people from the broad pool of Express Entry candidates, but it has largely focused on category-based selections since late June. The categories are in effect for 2023 and subject to change thereafter.
Dr. Banerjee said this adds “uncertainty” to a system that, because of the points system, was more predictable for prospective immigrants. “People who perhaps have a higher score may be overlooked, and this could lead to a lot of frustration,” she said.
Recognizing foreign credentials is another issue, Mr. Falconer said. Just because someone is selected for their health care work experience doesn’t mean they’ll easily transition into a similar role in Canada.
He said he senses “mission creep” in how IRCC is trying to fulfill multiple objectives at once, such as boosting the number of French speakers through an economic immigration program.
“If we want to accomplish goals outside of economic goals, I think that’s fine,” he said. However, with the Express Entry system, “we should really see it as the economic productivity stream, where we do aim to boost productivity across Canada.”
From 2016 onward, the relationship between conservative Christianity and MAGA-style populism has generated a wide range of reactions, few of them dispassionate. Center-right evangelicals lament the populist strand of the religious right and distinguish it from the moral strand. Critics on the left argue that the populist and moral strands were always one and the same. They declare MAGA politics to be the culmination of a radicalized religious right, and issue blanket condemnations. Postliberal Christian thinkers see a religious populist backlash as the natural consequence of the excesses of American liberalism. They exult in the prospective crumbling of the liberal system, hope for a robust Christian social order to replace it, and issue calls to arms.
These perspectives contain varying degrees of insight, but none is quite satisfactory as an explanation of how we got here. In his new book The Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism, and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West(Cambridge University Press 2023), Tobias Cremer offers a different interpretation of the conspicuous religious element in modern populist politics. He argues that across Western democracies, populist parties are increasingly employing religious symbolism and rhetoric in an identitarian rather than a religious way. What appears to be an embrace of Christianity is more a celebration of cultural markers (say, Christian history and architecture) used to define themselves against outsiders than an expression of Christian beliefs or moral commitments—Christendom without Christianity. Mobilizing statistics, political analysis, and the content of interviews with 114 political and religious leaders in Germany, France, and the United States, Cremer makes a strong case that religious-themed populism is not the result of religious revival or even backlash, but rather of secularization. This work marks a key contribution to conversations about religious populism and Christian nationalism.
Secular Uses of the Sacred
Cremer’s argument is fourfold. First, the old economic and moral cleavages that used to shape party politics in Western democracies are being supplanted by a new division between cosmopolitans and communitarians. Cosmopolitans embrace globalization, individualism, and multiculturalism, whereas communitarians place greater value on local attachments, inherited identities, and majority rights. The latter group, finding themselves culturally maligned by internal elites and demographically threatened by external immigrants, seek redress in the form of a combative, “us vs. them” populist style of politics. Second, right-wing populists wield Christian symbolism as a way of marking cultural identity rather than religious belief. For populist leaders seeking to forge a shared national identity in a diverse population, Christianity serves as a symbolically powerful “lowest common denominator” as well as a boundary marker against Muslim immigrants. Third, and crucially, populist use of religious symbolism resonates most strongly with nonreligious voters, while practicing Christians are comparatively immune. Fourth, this “religious immunity” to right-wing populism is dependent on the availability of appealing political alternatives for religious voters, as well as the extent to which religious leaders discourage support for populist parties among their followers.
Cremer illustrates these points with an in-depth examination of the cases of Germany, France, and the United States, each of which receives its own section of the book. All three of these countries saw a rise in the demand for populist politics during the 2010s— Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) in France, and Trump’s Republican Party in the United States. In each of these cases, populist use of religious symbols has been highly visible. AfD supporters march in Dresden singing hymns and wielding large crosses. French demonstrators by the thousands, organized by RN, deposit flowers at the feet of a statue of the country’s national saint, Joan of Arc, in veneration. In the United States, crowds wielding bibles and waving Christian flags storm the Capitol building in defiance of the outcome of the 2020 election. Observers of these spectacles draw the seemingly reasonable conclusion that they represent a radicalized religious right in the democratic West.
But this conclusion, Cremer argues, is mistaken. In each of these countries, populist use of religious symbolism has coincided with the marginalization of Christian belief and practice within populist parties. In Germany, AfD expresses skepticism toward the nation’s system of state-supported churches and resists the high social and political status of religious leaders, preferring a reduced role for religion in the public square. France’s RN similarly embraces an extreme form of public secularism, or laïcité. Neither AfD nor RN shows any interest in a conservative social agenda on such issues as same-sex marriage or abortion. Indeed, many statements by populist party leaders explicitly identify the kind of Christianity they advocate as cultural or identitarian rather than religious, and reject the prospect of their parties being influenced by Christian doctrine. While the United States differs in some key respects, the Trump administration shared with its European counterparts an elevation of nonreligious or populist figures over religious ones. Most religious leaders had little access to the Trump White House, and while he maintained an evangelical Faith Advisory Board, Cremer’s interviewees suggest this represented a strategic effort to curb religious criticism rather than any serious desire to institute a Christian policy agenda. In Trump’s administration, the Steve Bannon wing loomed larger than the Mike Pence wing (and current tensions between the Trump campaign and the pro-life movement suggest that not much has changed). Similarly, in AfD and RN Christian members are marginalized while secular, atheist, or neo-pagan strands of the parties wield greater influence.
Religious Immunity
Interviews with religious leaders show that the relationship between religion and right-wing populism is chilly on both sides. In Germany, Catholic and Protestant leaders have been consistent and outspoken critics of AfD, instituting strong social taboos against populist support among their members. Until recently, the French Catholic Church similarly denounced RN without equivocation, even denying sacraments to some of the party’s politicians. Cremer credits strong social taboos against participation in populist politics instituted by religious leaders for the fact that churchgoing Catholics and Protestants in these countries have historically exhibited low support for these parties, indicating a “religious immunity” effect.
Early in the 2016 primaries, this effect was in evidence in the United States as well. Several prominent religious leaders declared Trump an unfit candidate for office, and in the primary vote, churchgoing Republicans were substantially less likely to support Trump than their religiously disengaged co-partisans. Yet by the time of the general election, religious voters were some of his most loyal supporters. Cremer identifies several factors that explain this reversal. First, party loyalty—religious support for the GOP was too entrenched to be disrupted by the nomination of a decidedly irreligious candidate. Second, a lack of alternatives—in a two-party system, the only other serious contender was a Democratic Party with a secularist stance and socially liberal policy platform wholly unacceptable to many religious voters. Third, the Trump campaign made inroads with evangelical leaders and made policy commitments that were appealing to the religious right. Fourth, given the diffuse and non-hierarchical nature of America’s churches, there was a lack of religious leaders with sufficient ability and influence to oppose the right-wing populist movement as clergy in France and Germany had done. These factors in combination undermined the “religious immunity” effect in the United States.
Ultimately, Cremer is positing a Europeanization of American politics in which social cleavages have less to do with economics or morality than the value of national and cultural identity. This shift is captured in a quote from sociologist Eric Kaufmann: “During the Bush years European observers saw American politics as profoundly alien. By 2016 it was to become thoroughly familiar.” American analysts have struggled to provide an accurate diagnosis because they are thinking in categories of class struggles and culture wars that are becoming outdated. For insight into our political moment, we should look across the pond.
Post-religious Right
With respect to the question of “how we got here” in the American case, Cremer’s key insight is that Trump—and more broadly, the style of politics he represents—did not rise to power on the shoulders of the religious right, but rather the post-religious right. Indeed, his presidency was made possible by the very process of secularization that the religious right has long sought to combat. Trump’s coalition may instead be viewed as an alliance between the religious and post-religious right, with the former playing the role of junior partner. Counterintuitively, the conspicuous Christian symbolism present in such populist settings as MAGA rallies and the January 6 storming of the Capitol does not reflect a resurgent and radicalized religious right, but rather one that has been eclipsed by more secular right-wing forces. This understanding offers an important corrective to reductionistic accounts of a Christian nationalist monolith that have dominated scholarship in this area.
While Cremer’s theory goes a long way toward helping us make sense of the past decade’s bewildering political developments, however, it pays little heed to evidence of at least partial overlap between the religious and populist right. Religion data scientist Ryan Burge has shown that in the 2016 Republican primaries, 44 percent of weekly-or-more churchgoers voted for Trump over evangelical candidates like Ted Cruz. This is, if not an outright endorsement, hardly a stinging rebuke. Figures with unimpeachable religious right credentials such as Eric Metaxas have come out as full-throated Trump supporters, while center-right evangelicals like David French and Tim Alberta lament the MAGA-fication of their religious communities. Clearly for many Americans, the tension between their religious commitments and populist politics is surmountable.
On the other side of the ledger, the religious right gained undeniable policy victories from their alliance with the populist right. The religious conservative Holy Grail of the overturning of Roe v. Wade would not have happened if religious voters had withheld support for Trump in the 2016 general election. These facts suggest a possibility absent in France or Germany, where weekly worship attendance is in single digits, but perhaps present in the United States: that of a populist religious right. The populist political style is not incompatible with either religious commitment or social conservatism, and social boundaries can be drawn around religion and morality as easily as birthplace or ethnicity. GOP lawmakers in red states like Texas and Montana offer a taste of what a populist politics that emphasizes religion over ethnicity might look like. Cremer rightly draws our focus to the distinctions and tensions between the religious and populist right, but we should also not lose sight of the prospect of their synthesis.
This caveat aside, The Godless Crusade offers an elegant, compelling, and well-researched account of the overlooked role of secularized religious-themed populism on both sides of the Atlantic—one refreshingly free of pontificating. It deserves to be widely read. Cremer both builds on and challenges existing accounts. His book can create more fruitful conversations about conflicts over the role of religion in the public sphere.
Would be much stronger, as is often the case, were the commentary include more of a historical perspective on changes, progress and gaps. And normal, albeit frustrating, the time lag between increased diversity and it being fully represented in the various institutions.
While I haven’t yet looked at the relevant 2021 Census data for the education field of study, in 2016, visible minorities formed less than 20 percent of those in education, Blacks less than two percent, highlighting some of the “supply side” issues and barriers:
As a Canadian, you could be forgiven if the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action has furthered your sense of moral superiority over our southern neighbours.
After all, in contrast to America, Canada’s constitution explicitly allows “any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” But in the four decades since Canada has had constitutionally sanctioned affirmative action, how much progress have we made in addressing racial disparities?
According to the University of Calgary’s Malinda Smith, the primary beneficiaries of these efforts have been white women. Smith argues that “despite four decades of equity policies — corporate boards, the judiciary, and the police continue to be shaped by racial and ethnic segregation, and remain overwhelmingly white and to a lesser extent male, thus maintaining the historic colour-coded ethnic pecking order even across gender and sexual difference.”
Smith has termed this process “diversifying whiteness,” whereby institutions promote their increased diversity (with respect to gender, sexuality, and disability), while comfortably maintaining a predominantly white workforce.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in our K-12 education systems. It has long been recognized that having school staff that reflect the students and communities they serve can lead to more equitable outcomes.
However, the reality is that our schools are largely the domain of white women. An audit of the York Region District School Board found that while racialized people comprise about half of York Region’s population, just under one quarter of school board staff is racialized.
According to data from the Halton District School Board, while half of its students are racialized, racialized people make up only 18 per cent of its staff. Similarly, an investigation into the Peel District School Board found that while 83 per cent of its students were from racialized backgrounds, racialized people comprise only 33 per cent of its staff. In all boards, staff are predominantly white and female.
So how is it that despite decades of constitutionally sanctioned affirmative action, we still have school systems that are mostly white? It is part of an educational trajectory — that starts in elementary and high schools and continues to universities and school boards — where some people are encouraged along certain paths, and others are nudged away. Addressing the racial disparities in our school systems requires disrupting current practices at all points in this trajectory.
This is why the TDSB’s attempts to diversify admissions to its specialty schools is so important. It is also why the Waterloo Region District School Board should be commended for its recent job fair specifically for Indigenous, Black, and racialized individuals. It takes a certain amount of moral fortitude to persist despite the inevitable reactionary backlash that occurs when racial disparities are addressed so explicitly.
Critics have panned both initiatives as divisive and akin to establishing a racial hierarchy. It is as if we do not already have a well-established racial hierarchy, which is what these programs are trying to address.
Opponents of affirmative action programs state that we should just accept the best candidates, irrespective of race. As U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts once wrote, “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Yet, decades of studiesthatcontinue to show that organizations respond to resumes with white-sounding names at much higher rates than identical resumes with racialized names expose the myth that we are all judged on some objective metric of “merit.” Organizations need to stop pretending that it is complicated. The way to have greater racial diversity is to have greater racial diversity.
Sachin Maharaj is an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa.
Victim of its success in terms of interest, success and outcomes to be determined but aligned with productivity objectives:
Canada’s new program to entice H-1B visa holders to the country attracted so many applications that the 10,000 limit was reached in less than 48 hours. The response is likely a warning sign to U.S. policymakers that many highly sought foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States are dissatisfied with the U.S. immigration system and seeking other options. Canada may reopen the program and accept more applications if it finds not all applicants are approved and entered the country to work.
On June 27, 2023, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Sean Fraser announced Canada’s “Tech Talent Strategy,” including a new program to provide open work permits for 10,000 H-1B visa holders. Only the principals would count against the limit, although spouses and children 16 or older would be eligible to work. In the United States, typically, only the spouses of H-1B visa holders with pending green card applications receive employment authorization.
“As of July 16, 2023, H-1B specialty occupation visa holders in the US, and their accompanying immediate family members, will be eligible to apply to come to Canada,” according to a Canadian government Backgrounder. “Approved applicants will receive an open work permit of up to three years in duration, which means they will be able to work for almost any employer anywhere in Canada.”
The online application process for H-1B visa holders started on July 16th, but on July 17th potential applicants received a message stating: “You can no longer apply: We reached the cap of 10,000 applications for this initiative on July 17, 2023.” Analysts consider this an overwhelming response.
Will Canada Reopen The Application Process For H-1B Visa Holders?
Attorneys believe Canada may reopen the application process after it determines the number of individuals who applied and did not follow through in coming to Canada.
“What normally happens is, after you fill out your forms, they say, congratulations,” said Peter Rekai, senior partner of Rekai LLP in Toronto. “If you’re a person who needs a visa, you submit your passport. If they don’t submit their passports, you know those positions have not been used, and they have opted out. If they do submit their passports and they get a visa stamp in it and the work permit authorization, then they have to cross the border with the authorization. If they don’t cross the border with the authorization, it doesn’t become active. The government would then be able to determine how many people actually activated these work permits.”
David Crawford, a partner with Fragomen in Toronto, agrees with Rekai that the Canadian government will evaluate the intake of current applications before committing to further actions. “I am sure that officials will open up to more applications in due course,” said Crawford. “They will have to sift through what they have, and I assume that some applications will be incomplete and/or ineligible. Once they learn the numbers and have a feel for how many will take up the opportunity, they can commit to the next steps.”
Rekai thinks it will likely be months before the Canadian government can determine how many people have followed through and entered Canada to work. He cites a Canadian program for sponsoring parents and grandparents where the government opened up additional spots after a period of evaluating eligibility.
What Will Happen To The Canada Program In 2024?
The fate of the Canadian program for H-1B visa holders likely rests on what happens with the current crop of applicants. “I think the government will evaluate how this went,” said Peter Rekai. “First, see how many people came in and try to determine whether people with open work permits got jobs quickly in Canada and get feedback from the industry. Officials will determine the success of the program and then decide next year.”
David Crawford sees a similar process. “The Government of Canada will probably want to see how many enter using this program to measure success, but I am sure that it has introduced this category in the hope that it will be a new and valuable source of prospective immigrants.”
Unlike in the United States, Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Sean Fraser has wide latitude in adding or modifying temporary worker programs.
Multicultural Meanderings 