Adam Legge and Irfhan Rawji: Our immigration strategy is failing to deliver on its most important promise

2024/05/23 Leave a comment

Apart from proposing a shift in selection criteria (EE CRS) to provide more points for the trades, not specific recommendations. And arguably, the existing wealth of immigration-related data is adequate to assess overall impact on immigration’s contribution to the Canadian economy along with socioeconomic outcomes of immigrants:

Canada is a nation that has benefited tremendously from immigration. At its core, the promise of immigration is this: that new Canadians can come here from around the world, contribute to our economy and society, and build a great life for themselves, and that when they do, we will all collectively be better off for it.

The problem is, we have not been delivering on that promise.

In recent years, Canada’s immigration system has strayed, and while there are still many positives, it hasn’t been delivering as well for established Canadians and newcomers alike. Perhaps most importantly—and most frankly—is that it’s not making everyone better off, and Canadians are getting poorer.

Right now, Canada’s economy has stagnated. In fact, Canadians are no better off today than they were in 2014. And, with future productivity expectations in the gutter, our economy will not grow at the pace required to deliver opportunities for a growing population. All this has created frustration among Canadians, both long-established and new ones. Less than one-third of Canadians believe that our current approach to immigration is effective, and one-third of immigrants are unsure of their decision to move to Canada.

That’s a bad sign for Canada’s future. Future prosperity requires that the Canadian economy generates more value, not just because there are more of us, but because each one of us is better off. To get there, we need an enhanced approach and a renewed focus on the actual purpose of economic immigration: to generate prosperity for all. 

There are two main ways we need to do this:

  • Attracting and selecting the best candidates for economic immigration
  • Improving outcomes for newcomers themselves

On the selection of the best economic candidates, the statistics around this may surprise many Canadians. Today, about half of the people admitted into Canada in the economic category were not, in fact, selected for their economic contributions. They are the spouses and dependents of a primary economic immigrant. For every 10 newcomers to Canada, about three are personally selected for their economic contribution. While many of these additional people have great contributions to make to our economy as well, when we’re counting five-year-olds as economic immigrants, it’s no wonder we’re not seeing the level of economic boost we might expect.

Also, there are big gaps in how Canada decides which economic immigrants to select. Take as an example a person with a master’s degree in—because we need to pick something—Latin, versus a person with a certification as a heavy-duty mechanic.

All else held equal, the person with the master’s would receive more points than the mechanic, due simply to years of education, despite the fact that the mechanic has vastly higher average earning potential in Canada today. And, with full respect to both professions, Canada also needs far more heavy mechanics right now than we do TAs in Latin.

A clear needle-moving fix is to reform the points system used to better select economic immigrants, prioritizing those with higher earning potential over other measures. We should also make this system dynamic and update it frequently to account for changes in what skills our economy needs in real time.

On the second front, improving newcomer experience and outcomes, the fixes are clear but that doesn’t make them easy. The process needs to be streamlined and simplified. We need to connect newcomers to supports so they can find a home and a job as quickly as possible. More than all else, we need to make it much easier for newcomers to use their skills in the Canadian labour market. We must view it as economically and morally unacceptable to have people delivering Skip the Dishes who are trained as—and would prefer to be working as—physicians and engineers.

Finally, as every business person knows, what gets measured gets done. For our immigration system, we need to enhance it to deliver on its stated goal of making everyone better off. That requires tying our strategy to clear indicators of prosperity such as GDP growth per capita and directing our resources to best increase those metrics.  

There is a mandate for change. In a poll from Abacus, nearly 70 percent of Canadians feel the current immigration targets are too high. We owe it to all Canadians, from those who have been here the longest to the newest, to deliver on the promise of immigration and make everyone better off from it.

Source: Adam Legge and Irfhan Rawji: Our immigration strategy is failing to deliver on its most important promise

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The cure for Canada’s housing crisis? Boost immigration

2023/06/27 Leave a comment

Needless to say, I disagree with the logic and the false parallel with the situation over a century ago.

The problem with asserting the issue is the lack of a “can do” attitude is that while the government can turn up the needle on permanent and temporary migration, housing, healthcare and infrastructure have longer timelines.

While it is helpful that the Century Initiative and others are acknowledging these challenges, the reality is that little progress is being made and thus the calls for restraint:

There is a new fashion among the commentariat of questioning whether Canada has the capacity to accommodate greater immigration, particularly in housing and health care. The underlying defeatism of this position – the belief that we’ve achieved all we can – would leave Clifford Sifton depressed and ashamed.

In 1896, prime minister Wilfrid Laurier tasked this enterprising, 35-year-old Manitoban to “populate” the Prairies with European farmers, following years of net emigration from Canada. Laurier envisioned an agricultural powerhouse to provide an abundant, reliable food supply for our nascent country while solidifying Canada’s claim to the region.

Sifton met this challenge with a radically simple plan: find immigrants with experience farming similarly harsh terrain – people made of “the toughest fibre” – and lure them to Canada with free land.

After considering various candidates, he settled on Eastern Europeans, who had farmed inhospitable steppes like ours for generations. Sifton dispatched agents across Europe circulating ads in Polish, Czech and Ukrainian, promising “160 acres of free land in Canada,” and paid them generous commissions.

We need not condone that Indigenous nations were illegally displaced from this land to appreciate the sheer audacity of Sifton’s achievement. Within five years, he doubled the Prairie population. Within 10 years, annual immigration to Canada increased 840 per cent. And 125 years later, the farms these immigrants established feed not just Canada, but much of the world.

Contrast Sifton’s can-do optimism to the despondent attitude of pundits today, who are unsure how we might handle immigration levels that, at around 1 per cent of the population, are half the rate they were in Sifton’s era.

There are growing calls to constrict immigration until the housing crisis is “resolved” – imprecise though that is. We would be wise to recall what Sifton knew. Immigrants are not the cause of Canada’s failings. Actually, they’re a big part of the answer.

Immigrants don’t simply occupy existing housing. Fact is, they built most of our current housing stock and could build even more. Each worker occupies one home (less, if they share) and builds dozens more for everyone else – an irrefutable net gain.

Yet even when we grasp this seemingly obvious fact, our response falls short. Ontario recently announced that it will almost double the number of skilled workers it welcomes each year, to 18,000 by 2025. Yet even this seemingly ambitious plan is not designed to succeed. If current trends continue, about 6,000 of those will be construction workers. Yet Ontario Labour Minister Monte McNaughton has saidthat in “construction alone we’ll need 100,000 skilled workers over the next decade.”

Six thousand is not an appropriate target; 60,000 is closer to the mark.

A recent federal plan to specifically prioritize construction workers for immigration applications is similarly enlightened yet tepid. It comes with no targets. Were we genuinely committed to solving the housing crisis, we would aggressively recruit the people who can do so, and in huge numbers.

Where would they live upon arrival? Are we really so bereft of purpose and creativity? In Sifton’s day, newcomers lived in government-operated immigration halls until they found their feet. Hardly glamorous, but sufficient. Calgary is pioneering the conversion of vacant office space to residential use. Given the severity of the housing emergency, we should also consider unconventional options, including convention centres and military facilities. It just makes sense to house those whose labour could house us all.

As with housing, newcomers are not the cause of Canada’s health care failures. But they could be an answer. For example, Ontario reportedly needs 24,000 more nurses. That’s just 5 per cent of the 465,000 permanent residents Canada will welcome in 2023. Strategic immigration could eliminate this shortage in mere months.

Some might call these proposals naive: simplistic attempts to impose a 19th-century frontier mindset onto today’s stifling, maximally bureaucratized reality.

These are the weak excuses of the undetermined. We need not inhabit Sifton’s era to honour his ethos: a confident belief that we can overcome existential threats to Canada’s viability. We cannot (and should not) give the most in-demand newcomers stolen Indigenous land, but we can offer other perks, like expanded and expedited family reunification privileges. Intransigent provinces? Withhold transfer payments. Intransigent medical guilds? Show the public who is keeping much-needed help from reaching the front lines of care. These are emergencies. We should act accordingly. Do whatever it takes.

Housing and health care failings pose existential threats to Canada. The only shortage more acute than that of skilled people to provide these vital services is the shortage of audacity to believe that we are capable of solving these problems: the confident ambition to make big dreams come true.

Irfhan Rawji is managing partner of Relay Ventures. Daniel Bernhard is CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

Source: The cure for Canada’s housing crisis? Boost immigration

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