Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2024/10/31 Leave a comment
Indeed:
…Bubble zones would protect everyone’s right to be free of harassment as they go into community spaces. The right to demonstrate cannot become a licence to intimidate.
2024/08/29 Leave a comment
Yes:
…The system to welcome new Canadians – the comprehensive ranking system, colloquially known as the points system – was designed to minimize political meddling. It’s the core method used to select economic immigrants, who account for about 60 per cent of all new permanent residents. Yet the Liberals, like their back-and-forth changes around temporary foreign workers, have weakened a system that prioritized newcomers with high levels of education and promising futures in Canada. Instead, they have politicized the system with a lengthening list of exceptions that does an end run around the central philosophy of the points system.
The latest proposal, as The Globe reported last Friday, is to potentially allow people who have at most finished high school and are currently in low-wage temporary foreign worker jobs a path to permanent residency. This is not what economic immigration is supposed to be. The future of Canada’s prosperity cannot be built on low-wage jobs.
The low-wage temporary foreign worker program for jobs such as those in food service was never a key pillar of our immigration system, nor should it ever be. It’s a relatively recent invention, created in 2002. The experience of a decade ago should have been a lesson: as this space wrote last year, Mr. Trudeau himself urged reform in 2014.
Loosening the rules in 2022 should have never happened. While Monday’s changes are welcome, what would be more welcome is an immigration policy that does not react to the latest news and instead focuses on long-term results.
Source: Immigration requires steady policy, not constant ad hoc change
2024/08/12 Leave a comment
Indeed. Not seeing much impact yet in numbers in government rolling back some of the earlier ill-advised facilitation under former immigration minister Fraser and his DMs:
…As is the case with much of the immigration file, the Liberals have moved only slowly to undo what have become clearly damaging changes. Last October, the government decreased the validity period for labour market impact assessments to 12 months, when the national unemployment rate had hit 5.7 per cent, up from 5.1 per cent in the spring of 2022.
In March, the validity period was reduced to six months, a belated recognition of the realities of the labour market. At the same time, the government said only two sectors would still be allowed to use foreign workers for up to 30 per cent of their workforce. But it kept in place the 20-per-cent rule for all other sectors, despite rising unemployment.
On Tuesday, Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault hinted that further tightening may be on the way, as he announced several anti-fraud measures. Of course, companies who abuse the rules and their workers should be punished.
But the real problem with the low-wage temporary foreign worker program is not abuse of the rules – it’s the rules themselves. The press release from Mr. Boisonnault’s office boldly stated that the temporary foreign worker program “is designed as an extraordinary measure to be used when a qualified Canadian is not able to fill a job vacancy.”
That may have been the case once. But now that is demonstrably untrue – and a slap in the face to unemployed workers struggling to find a job while the Liberal government allows businesses to continue to import cheap labour.
Source: Fraud in the temporary worker program isn’t the problem. The rules that rig the labour market are
2024/06/24 Leave a comment
Great summary:
…Ultimately, Ottawa must act to fix the incentive structure that has contributed to the lack of affordable housing. As we’ve argued before, students should be limited to on-campus work. Ottawa should not guarantee permanent residency for international students, although they should be able to apply. Decisive action, which to date has been lacking, will eliminate the incentives that have distorted Canada’s international student system.
That action starts with asking the right question: how can Ottawa fix the mess it has made?
Source: The right question to ask about international students and housing
2024/05/24 Leave a comment
Of note:
…Ottawa has made the choice to select lower-scoring immigrants who fit into specialized niches in the economy rather than those who, according to Canada’s own immigration system, have a better chance of long-term success.
… But it would be a serious policy blunder to carve out even more exceptions and further squeeze the general pool of permanent resident spots. Such an action would cement the trend toward a low-wage economy largely populated by immigrants.
A better, if tougher, approach would be to allow temporary migrants to compete for a spot in the general pool. Some will undoubtedly qualify, and will help to build Canada in the coming decades. Others won’t and will have to leave.
The Liberals need to keep in mind two imperatives in sorting out economic migration policy: the needs of Canadians come first – and magical thinking won’t get the country’s economy back on track.
Source: Sorry, Ottawa, but magical thinking won’t fix the economy
2024/04/15 Leave a comment
Good editorial:
….So let’s stop playing those roles, or shoving others into them. Enough with the tyranny of orthodoxy and treating any disagreement as instant evidence of bad faith.
Your brain and your window on the world aren’t a no-substitutions-allowed meal kit. It’s a grocery store where you can pick up and discard what works for you. If someone doesn’t like the looks of what’s in your shopping cart, that doesn’t make you an awful cook – or a terrible human being. It just means they want something different for dinner tonight.
The underlying irony is that most of us don’t even want to play this game.
When Angus Reid asked people to pick the word they most associate with the culture wars, a clear majority of Canadians picked two words: “divisive” and “exhausting.”
Now there’s something all of us can agree on.
Source: Substitutions and deletions, please: The absolutes of the culture wars are divisive and exhausting
2024/03/30 Leave a comment
Indeed:
…The Liberal government needs to learn from its mistakes and think through its next steps, so that it doesn’t overcorrect or undercorrect.
That means sharpening the points-based ranking system to ensure newcomers are best suited to the country’s needs, and setting caps that match the state of the economy and the nation’s housing infrastructure.
It means basing immigration levels on data, not on what looks good in a press release. It means remembering that the proper role of immigration is to ensure that Canada, and the people who come here, can prosper.
Above all, it means no more winging it.
2024/02/06 Leave a comment
Latest Globe immigration editorial advocating for an increased share of economic immigration, partly to replace needed reductions of international students and temporary workers, in the context of overall levels of one percent of the population, or about 400,000, a reduction of about 20 percent from 2025 target:
But the fact remains that Canada needs immigrants, badly. Statistics Canada reported last week that the total fertility rate has declined to 1.33 children per woman, far below 2.1 replacement rate that ensures a stable population. Without robust immigration, Canada would lack the workers needed to fill labour shortages, and to pay the taxes that sustain social services and pensions.
Other developed countries that do not embrace immigration, from Japan to Poland, are experiencing weak economic growth and relentless population decline. To prevent that, Canada needs to maintain an intake target of about 1 per cent of the existing population annually.
…
Lastly, economic migration should be the focus of any expansion of overall immigration targets. Ottawa is already moving in that direction, with the economic migration category edging up to a planned 60 per cent of the total in 2026 from 58 per cent in 2022. That proportion should continue to rise, with other categories increasing at a slower pace.
Canada’s history of welcoming newcomers is not just one of this country’s finest characteristics – it is one of our biggest competitive advantages. Measured action now can restore confidence to the immigration system that has served Canada so well for so many years.
Source: Canada is an immigration nation
2024/02/05 Leave a comment
Well said:
…
The program is in chaos, a failure of federalism, where both Ottawa and the provinces have neglected to work together to execute their respective responsibilities. The program should never have been tailored to address short-term labour market demands for truck drivers and child care workers.
Canada can have an international student program that shines again, if both levels of government reconnect with its original, higher purpose.
source: Let’s get Canada’s foreign student program back to the classroom
2024/01/30 Leave a comment
Similarly, a pattern in the Globe’s coverage of and commentary on immigration with the needed critical eye:
A pattern has emerged in Liberal immigration policy over the past year: Ignore mounting evidence of trouble, dismiss rumbles of criticism and, finally, take the smallest possible action to avert an all-out calamity.
There was abundant evidence for months that the pace of new arrivals, particularly temporary migrants, was putting unacceptable strain on housing in big cities and other social infrastructure. But it was not until November that the Trudeau government took the tentative step of tamping down the growth in permanent immigration – misleadingly referred to as “stabilizing” by the government. Even with the change, permanent immigration targets will rise this year and next, with an extra 55,000 people admitted over that two-year span.
Last week, there were half-measures to curb the eye-popping growth in the ranks of international students, with Immigration Minister Marc Miller announcing a two-year cap on international study visas. But that cap is being imposed with visas already at historically high levels.
…
In the first 11 months of last year, 128,690 people made asylum claims in Canada, more than double the number in the prepandemic year of 2019. Claims from Mexican nationals in 2023 accounted for 17 per cent of the total, nearly double their proportion in 2019….
Click image for book purchase
Multicultural Meanderings 