‘Structural solutions not inflammatory conclusions’ required to fix foreign worker program: Senator Omidvar

2024/08/22 Leave a comment

More balanced than the special rapporteurs language and reasonable recommendations for the current and likely future government to consider, although finding the right balance between employers and workers remains a challenge:

…While the government and groups like the Canadian Chamber of Commercemay reject the UN rapporteur’s characterization of the program, the recent Senate report found similar abuses within the program. 

On May 21, the Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science, and Technology released its own report on Canada’s migrant labour infrastructure, which it said is failing both workers and employers. 

Beginning its study in November 2022, the committee heard evidence and testimony from temporary foreign workers and employers, academics, policy experts, and government officials. Members also visited workplaces in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island on a fact-finding mission. 

While Obokata did not visit any farms or fisheries—as the Senate committee did—Omidvar said the Senators who worked on the report were able to come to their findings with “clear eyes,” having accounted for all perspectives. 

Fittingly, those perspectives informed the first of the committee’s recommendations to provide what Omidvar said are “structural solutions” to a program that has grown in a rapid, disorganized, and often piecemeal manner for decades.

In its report, the committee offered six recommendations, the first of which is the establishment and funding of a tripartite Migrant Work Commission, modelled after the Canada Employment Insurance Commission, that would include a commissioner representing migrant workers, employers, and the federal government. 

“Right now, there is no single place where either an employer or a migrant worker can go to address their issues,“ Omidvar explained. “In particular, there are not enough avenues of complaints for migrant workers that are nimble, effective, and worker-friendly.”

The second recommendation mirrors the UN report, but Omidvar said the committee recommends the full phase-out of closed work permits in the next three years, rather than immediately.

“You cannot go from extreme heat to extreme cold without creating severe cracks and fissures in the system,” Omidvar said, explaining that while the committee had identified closed work permits as an area of concern, the federal government would need time to negotiate with provinces to create regional, sector-wide permits to replace them.

Omidvar said the third most important recommendation is that workplace inspections be unannounced as a standard, adding that the current practice allows for unscrupulous employers to engineer a compliant workplace to give the illusion of compliance when inspectors arrive.

While Omidvar recognized that could also be true for the workplaces the committee visited—or at the very least, that only already compliant “good workplaces” would have even accepted their request for a visit—she said the workplaces she did see were undoubtedly having a positive impact on its workers and community.

At one seafood processing plant, Omidvar recalled speaking with employees who had arrived as temporary workers and successfully applied for permanent residency with the aid of sponsorship from their employer. She said that the new influx of residents had reinvigorated and revitalized the community with “new families, teachers, and parishioners” filling the local church every Sunday.

On the other side of the spectrum, Omidvar said the committee also met with migrant workers in closed-door meetings in other communities who detailed instances of abuse, including withholding access to health care. She explained that those abuses can be particularly problematic in rural and remote communities without nearby doctors or medical facilities.

Additionally, many of those workers said that there was a lack of clarity on the pathways to permanent residency, she noted. 

“They’re operating in a fog of information, and we need to make those pathways crystal clear,” Omidvar said, adding that Canada needs an annual migrant worker level plan, as it has for annual immigration. 

“The whole system post-COVID has been kind of bent out of shape with exceptions that we made to meet various needs,” Omidvar said. “Now, we need to get back to the drawing board and reconfigure this in a sensible, pragmatic, and doable manner that ensures the rights of migrant workers are paramount.”

Source: ‘Structural solutions not inflammatory conclusions’ required to fix foreign worker program: Senator Omidvar

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Omidvar: Be wary of simple solutions on the foreign student issue

2024/01/31 Leave a comment

IMO, a reasonably targeted and focused set of measures:

Blunt instruments draw blood from all parts of the body, when a sharp scalpel is better suited to the surgery. Mr. Miller has chosen a blunt instrument. It will certainly draw blood. The underbelly of the industry, that he refers to as “puppy mills,” should and will close down. The limitation of postgraduation work permits to students from those institutions will limit the number who end up working behind the tills at big box stores and other low-paying outlets. Will these chains raise wages to get the staff they need? Will unemployed Canadians work in the retail, hospitality and tourism sectors over a sustained period of time? These are questions we don’t have the answers to.

We now face the serious risk that domestic students will face a drop in the quality of education they receive as universities and colleges lose fees from international students they have come to rely on. Provincial governments need to wake up. The “blue-ribbon” task force struck by Ontario Premier Doug Ford has made sensible proposals on stabilizing funding for universities and colleges, such as “a one-time significant adjustment in per-student funding for colleges and universities to recognize unusually high inflationary cost increases over the past several years,” and “a commitment to more modest annual adjustments over the next three to five years.” These types of recommendations need to be heeded and implemented promptly.

We have allowed ourselves to get tangled up in a sticky problem of our own making by all levels of government. But we can untangle ourselves from it if we go back to the basics of education. Providing high-quality education for Canadian students should not be reliant on external forces. Providing excellent education for foreign students must become an aspiration so we can educate young people from all over the world and they can take a bit of Canada back with them. Unfortunately, in higher education in Canada today, the tail is wagging the dog.

Ratna Omidvar is an independent senator from Ontario.

Source: Be wary of simple solutions on the foreign student issue

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Foreign students being tricked into thinking they can get permanent residency by studying in Canada, experts warn

2023/09/27 Leave a comment

More on the report by Senators Omidvar, Youssugg and Woo:

Foreign students, some of them confused by false promises from immigration consultants, are being misled into thinking that studying at Canadian postsecondary schools is a guaranteed route to remaining permanently in the country, senators and immigration experts are warning.

A report by Senators Ratna Omidvar, Hassan Yussuff and Yuen Pau Woo about the federal international student program warns that there are not enough permanent residence spots to cater to the rising number of these students coming to Canada, and calls on Ottawa to make clear that the process of staying permanently is highly competitive.

Although attending a Canadian college or university can help a foreign student gain permanent residence here, success is not assured. Under a program known as Express Entry, Canada’s immigration system assigns scores to would-be permanent residents based on their work experience and other factors, and only the highest ranked are invited to apply.

The senators’ report also calls for federal action to stop education consultants – who are paid by Canadian colleges to recruit students abroad – from overselling the ease of getting Canadian work permits after graduation. In some cases, international students are denied these permits because their colleges are not “designated learning institutions,” meaning the schools aren’t on a government list of approved institutions.

In comments to the House of Commons last week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said international students are an asset to Canada and its future. But he said there needs to be a crackdown on consultants giving them “false hope.”

The senators’ report says it is often argued that the federal government itself is also “perpetuating an inflated sense of hope” among people who come to study in Canada.

“While the Canadian government is being honest in highlighting the immigration advantages of studying in Canada, it can perhaps do more to be forthright about the highly competitive nature of the permanent residence application process,” the report says.

The federal Immigration Department forecasts that the number of foreign students applying to come to Canada each year will rise to 1.4 million by 2027, according to an internal policy document. This year, around 900,000 are expected to study in Canada.

While Ottawa is increasing its immigration targets in the coming years, with a goal of admitting 500,000 permanent residents a year by 2025, the senators’ report says there will still not be enough spots to cater to the number of international students who wish to stay after graduation. It notes that while the number of permanent residents admitted each year is capped, there is no such cap on the number of temporary residents, including students.

Most international students want to gain permanent residence after they finish their studies, a 2021 survey of students for the Canadian Bureau for International Education found.

The survey found that 73 per cent of respondents planned to apply for postgraduation work permits, which allow former international students to work in Canada temporarily. The survey also found that 59 per cent said they intended to apply for permanent residence.

But not all postsecondary programs make students eligible for postgraduation work permits. The senators’ report says international students need to be made aware of this.

Ms. Omidvar, one of the report’s authors, said in an interview that the federal government should directly communicate with foreign students about the conditions for working and staying in Canada, to counter what she called “misinformation” from education consultants.

“It is the federal government’s responsibility to communicate with the students. When the visa is issued it should be accompanied by a letter,” she said.

Toronto immigration lawyer Michael Battista said many people discover after finishing their studies that they have been rejected for postgraduation work permits because the schools they attended, often private colleges, were not designated learning institutions.

Some return to their home countries, while others have to start their studies again at designated colleges, he said.

Mr. Battista, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s law faculty, said applications for permanent residence are becoming far more competitive. Qualifications that a few years ago would have allowed students to obtain permanent residence now aren’t enough, he said.

“International students are really being sold a false story,” he said, adding that many skilled graduates have waited so long for permanent residence that they have given up.

Ms. Omidvar said in some cases entire families have saved up to send one person to study in Canada. Some families in India have sold their land to pay student fees, she added.

The senators’ report says research by Statistics Canada found that 30 per cent of international students who came to Canada in the 2000s became permanent residents within 10 years of arriving.

Source: Foreign students being tricked into thinking they can get permanent residency by studying in Canada, experts warn

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Could these steps help fix Canada’s international student system? Senators think so

2023/09/21 Leave a comment

Sound assessment of some of the weaknesses and lack of integrity in international student recruitment and the complicity of education institutions and provincial governments.

Generally sensible recommendations but given jurisdictional issues, I favour some variant of provincial caps that oblige the provinces to tighten up approval of DLIs to address some of the worst abuse.

Ideally, of course, higher education would have adequate funding but defining “adequate” should not be equated with the status quo nor should it be assumed that provincial governments would simply pick up any shortfalls due to reduced international students:

Canadian governments must better police the educational sector and develop a national policy to manage foreign student intake to maintain the integrity of the country’s international education program, says a new study.

In a report released on Wednesday, four independent senators recommended stricter criteria for the so-called designated learning institutions (DLIs) to host international students and steeper penalties to hold them accountable to “unscrupulous behaviour and negligence” of their recruitment agents.

“Canada’s international student program benefits significantly from the presence of agents since they are the drivers of an industry that contributes tens of billions to the economy each year,” said the report prepared by Senators Sabi Marwah, Ratna Omidvar, Yuen Pau Woo and Hassan Yussuff.

“Agents and DLIs are not necessarily acting with the best interests in mind of international students themselves. There is little incentive and no oversight by Canadian governments to ensure both agents and DLIs place international students at DLIs most suitable for each student’s educational, career and immigration objectives.”

The integrity of Canada’s international student program has increasingly come under public scrutiny after hundreds of students from India were found to have come here with allegedly fraudulent college admission letters earlier this year.

Amid the country’s worsening housing crisis, the exponential growth of the international student population — inching toward 900,000 this year — has prompted the federal government to consider reining in their intake by strengthening its program integrity.

According to the Senate report, some 51 per cent of international students settle in Ontario, followed by B.C. (20 per cent), Quebec (12 per cent), Alberta and the Atlantic Provinces (both at 5 per cent) and Manitoba and Saskatchewan (both at 3 per cent).

While Canada has benefitted financially and culturally from international students — $22 billion in tuition revenues and spending to the economy a year, the report said there have been costs associated with the growth of the enrolment.

Canadian colleges and universities have continued to count on international tuition fees as a revenue source as government investments in education declined. Since 2006, said the report, the gap in tuition between international and domestic students has risen from double to five times as of last year.

“DLIs are responsible for setting admissions criteria for international students, but their desire to recruit as many as possible often results in low admissions standards,” said the 26-page report.

“DLIs then discover certain international students are not academically proficient enough to keep up with their programs in Canada.”

The recruitment frenzy has been fuelled by education agents, who typically receive from the schools a commission that ranges between 15 and 20 per cent of the admitted international student’s first year of tuition. The report said it works out to average commissions of $1,500 to $7,500 per student.

Adding to the mix are unscrupulous private colleges and ghost agents who prey on the ignorance of international students with “empty promises” about career prospects in Canada upon graduation and who lie about eligibility for work permits and permanent residence.

“The International Student Program has been a victim of its own success. International students have a strong desire to come to Canada, however they face many challenges including high tuition fees and abuse. In many cases they do not receive the support they need to overcome these difficulties,” said Sen. Omidvar.

“They are also being blamed for the many current economic and social challenges facing Canada, but they are the victims and not the perpetrators. We need to change the program to ensure it works for Canada and the students that contribute so much to our country.”

The Senate report said the top priority to address the integrity of the program is to conduct a national review to ensure the Canadian post-secondary sector is financially sustainable because funding shortfall is what has led to the aggressive recruitment of international students.

It also recommended a higher bar for schools to qualify to admit international students by requiring them to submit detailed plans on how they assist students in securing housing, asserting legal rights, finding employment — similar to what they had to comply during the pandemic as a condition to welcome international students back on campuses.

“DLIs who do not live up to standard should be subject to losing their ability to welcome additional international students,” said the report.

Given the “outsized role” education agents play in the industry, it recommended that immigration officials must regulate these recruiters and impose stronger penalties, such as fines and the revocation of DLI status against schools who benefit from unscrupulous agents.

The report said Canada should follow Australia’s step in requiring educational institutions to upload agent information into a centralized portal, including which agents they have written contracts with, and study visa outcomes by their agents including whether applications were approved, refused, withdrawn, or deemed invalid.

While many of the international students are lured by the prospects of permanent residence, just 30 per cent of them managed to become permanent residents within 10 years of arrivals due to the limited spots available annually.

The report said Canada must develop a national strategy to align the number of international students admitted with its annual permanent resident targets based on the needs of provinces, educational institutions and employers.

Source: Could these steps help fix Canada’s international student system? Senators think so

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Omidvar, Browder and Silver: Canada should honour Mahsa Amini’s memory by sanctioning her killers

2023/09/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

September 16 marks the first anniversary of the murder of Mahsa Amini in Iran. Those who killed her should be sanctioned by Canada.

Brutally beaten to death by Iranian authorities for not abiding by their strict restrictions against women’s autonomy and dress, Ms. Amini’s murder sparked global outrage and solidarity with the women of Iran.

Iranian women continue their brave campaign for freedom, unveiling themselves as acts of peaceful protest, knowing full well they may share the fate of Ms. Amini for doing so. Imagine their reaction when they learn that their torturers are visiting family in Toronto and vacationing in Vancouver.

In one of his first acts as Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Marc Miller rightly recognized and redressed this injustice, banning Iran’s former health minister, a major rights violator, from his frequent visits to Canada. But this lets the bigger fish off the hook.

Ebrahim Raisi used to be called The Hanging Judge from his time personally overseeing executions of political prisoners. Mr. Raisi’s cruelty followed him into Iran’s presidency, where he is now crucial to the brutal crackdown against women. Canada’s allies have already sanctioned him for his crimes, making Canada a curious outlier.

Similarly, Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution was recently sanctioned by the U.S. and U.K. for designing the regime’s anti-women laws and demanding their violent enforcement. The fact that its leaders can visit Canada at their leisure is an affront to the dignity and equality of Canadians, and sends the wrong message to Iranians.

Canada should instead be communicating solidarity and extending support for Iranians through its sanctions systems. The new law on asset repurposing, which was first proposed by World Refugee and Migration Council members Allan Rock and Lloyd Axworthy and advanced by us in Parliament, is perfectly suited to address the situation.

Seizing assets is the natural next step after freezing them, and Iranian victims are the obvious beneficiaries. For those struggling to rebuild their lives in Canada after losing limbs or loved ones to the torturers in Tehran, it would be poetic justice for them to receive the proceeds of assets their persecutors have hidden away in Canada.

We support the Atlantic Council Strategic Litigation Project’s proposal for Canada to create a fund for Canadian-Iranian victims, which would facilitate community involvement from coast to coast in the decision-making process. With a broad and inclusive board of directors cutting across the Iranian diaspora in Canada, the fund would ensure transparency and grassroots engagement in the distribution of seized assets for medical, material and psychosocial support to victims.

This fund will also draw out all those Iranian-Canadians with credible evidence of crimes perpetrated against them or their loved ones. This would allow Canada to document and build cases toward prospective prosecutions. In the same way Ukrainian refugees are being interviewed by the RCMP regarding Russian crimes, and Iraqis and Syrians about the Islamic State, Canada should be gathering evidence from Iranian victims in the country.

Sanctions and asset seizures are powerful forms of accountability and restitution, but prosecution should not be forgotten. Those Iranian rights abusers enjoying the freedoms in Canada that they deprive their compatriots of at home should be the ones sitting in prison. Even if they are not in Canada, or a perpetrator cannot be identified, the evidence gathered from victims could be used in other trials that might take place around the world.

Canada played a crucial role in setting up the continuing United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, which would benefit from the support of evidence gathered by Canadian investigators. Canada also leads the annual UN General Assembly resolution on Iran, which receives overwhelming support from around the world every year in calling out the crimes of the regime in Iran and expressing solidarity with its victims. When the General Assembly meets next week, Canada can use this global diplomatic platform to strengthen sanctions co-ordination and implementation, and build further global support for strengthening investigations of perpetrators.

For all the innocent women whose lives and liberties they have taken away, Canada can secure justice and send a global message that its borders, banks and businesses are closed to Iran regime criminals. We must honour Mahsa Amini’s memory, and the courage of Iranian women, in sanctioning or jailing their abusers. This important moment of commemorating her murder must not only be an act of remembrance, but a reminder that we must act.

Ratna Omidvar is an independent senator from Ontario who first proposed Canada’s asset repurposing laws in Parliament. Bill Browder is the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign. Brandon Silver is an international human rights lawyer and director of policy and projects at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Source: Canada should honour Mahsa Amini’s memory by sanctioning her killers

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Griffith and Omidvar: Canadian citizenship by individual click? That’s not a good idea

2023/03/08 Leave a comment

Written jointly with Senator Omidvar:

The federal government’s recent proposal to allow applicants to self-administer the citizenship oath instead of being required to do so before a citizenship judge or equivalent undermines the meaningfulness and significance of becoming a Canadian citizen with fellow new Canadians.

Citizenship ceremonies are one of the few special moments in which the federal government can connect with new Canadians and celebrate their becoming Canadian and furthering their integration journey.

From experience attending ceremonies and taking the oath, we know the impact on new Canadians is real and meaningful, as it is on existing Canadians in attendance. Having citizenship conferred is not transactional, unlike obtaining drivers’ licences, health cards or passports. Citizenship allows for political participation through voting and being able to run for office and thus directly influence the future direction of Canada.

The proposed change continues a trend of diminishing the value of Canadian citizenship in practical aspects. There has been the ongoing massive shift to virtual citizenship ceremonies, prompted by the pandemic but expanded (99 per cent since April 2020). As well, there is no updated citizenship study guide despite plans for one more than three immigration ministers ago.

The government justifies the proposed change on operational and financial grounds and is silent on the policy implications regarding integration of new Canadians. The previous government was similarly silent on the implications of its quintupling of adult citizenship fees in 2014-15, which we now know has resulted, along with other factors, in a significant drop in naturalization rates.

The current government is explicit that cost savings will come primarily from reduced citizenship ceremonies, both physical and virtual.

It is striking that a government so attuned to the importance of reconciliation and recognition of past and current injustices and the concerns of particular groups, can be so blind to the power of citizenship ceremonies to bring people of diverse origins together to celebrate them becoming part of Canadian society with all the rights and responsibilities that entails. And arguing, on inclusion grounds, that the change will save applicants two hours of ceremony time misses this broader aspect of inclusion.

Arguably, with pandemic measures largely over, the government should revert to in-person ceremonies as the default option, as these provide a greater sense of community and connection than virtual ceremonies.

The government, early in its mandate, made significant changes to residency and language requirements to improve inclusion, and more recently, changes to the oath of citizenship to recognize Indigenous and treaty rights. Reducing processing and ceremony time are insignificant in comparison.

We know from the recent Statistics Canada and the Institute for Canadian Citizenship analysis that naturalization has declined dramatically from 60.4 per cent in 2016 to 45.7 per cent in 2021, five to nine years after landing, reflecting a combination of factors, including the pandemic and high citizenship fees. A substantive inclusion measure would require the government to implement, at least partially, its platform commitment in the 2019 and 2021 election platforms to eliminate citizenship fees.

Citizenship provides a mix of personal and public benefits.

Applicants personally benefit from the security citizenship provides in terms of mobility and voting rights and the ability to run for office. Canadian society benefits from the “common bond for Canadian-born individuals and naturalized Canadians alike, signifying full membership in Canadian society.”

The proposed change highlights how the government treats citizenship as a service transaction rather than a substantive unifying and integrating process to help new Canadians feel fully part of Canadian society.

Andrew Griffith is the former director general for Citizenship and Multiculturalism and is a fellow of the Environics Institute and of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Sen. Ratna Omidvar is an independent senator from Ontario.

Source: Griffith and Omidvar: Canadian citizenship by individual click? That’s not a good idea

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Sen Omidvar: Canada needs to improve its immigration channels for essential migrant workers

2021/08/30 Leave a comment

Of note. But perhaps more fundamentally, we need a more thorough and comprehensive review of our medium and longer-term labour market needs, rather than just responding to current issues:

Canada is in dire need of more essential workers. Besides the ongoing pandemic, our population is aging rapidly. Each day, we have more elderly who need care and fewer workers to meet our employers’ needs. To address these issues, we need a proper migration channel allowing new essential workers at a variety of skill levels to come to Canada and help fill critical jobs. Such a streamlined pathway could be the first step toward making our system easier for both workers and employers. We need to move beyond the current scheme made up of a patchwork of pilots and hard-to-navigate programs. Our growing labour shortages and care needs create an imperative to begin building a comprehensive migration system supported by a collaborative effort by rights-respecting labour mobility actors.

In May, the government opened a one-time pathway to permanent residency for thousands of foreign-born individuals who already work in Canada in “essential” occupations. This program is one of many small steps that legislators have recently taken to address the effects of the ongoing pandemic. However, to truly address the labour shortage crisis, we need to not only offer permanent residency to those already in the country, but also to offer migration channels that will allow more newessential workers to enter.

The pandemic has especially highlighted the extent to which we depend on foreign-born caregivers, child-care workers and workers in the food supply chain. The waitlist for a personal support aide in Ottawa had nearly 3,000 names at the end of last year, and the number of job openings in health care and social assistance hit a record high after jumping nearly 57 per cent.

At the same time, Canadian farmers have reported that the lack of workers in agriculture has already led to production delays. Even pre-pandemic numbers point to a crucial workforce scarcity, with estimates that the country will be short about 200,000 new health-care aides and 123,000 farm workers by the end of this decade. Distressingly, this growing labour force scarcity is not tied just to certain sectors. The overall labour market trends suggest that in the next decade our businesses will be short by two million workers across many industries.

To address the deepening labour shortage, lawmakers decided that more than 400,000 foreign-born individuals – primarily those who are already in Canada – will become eligible for permanent residency in 2021. This will be only the sixth timesince 1867 that we have accepted more than 300,000 permanent residents. The federal government has already taken other meaningful steps toward this goal. Before announcing the one-time pathway to permanent residency for certain foreign-born essential workers, it lowered the threshold for immigrants applying for residency through the point-based system to a historic low.

Although these policies represent important efforts to boost permanent migration, they alone will not solve the labour scarcity issue. Neither one of them establishes sustainable pathways that allow new essential workers currently abroad to come work in Canada and settle here permanently, should they wish to do so.

Current regular mobility pathways exclude most essential workers, such as home caregivers, cashiers and food-processing workers because of education-based criteria that typically require formal certification or a degree. Despite the proven enduring need for essential workers with a variety of skills – not only doctors and registered nurses – the country has yet to introduce ways to accommodate these workers, who may have lower education levels but who are just as important.

Besides offering permanent residency to those who are already here, we need migration channels to bring more essential workers to Canada. Specifically, the government should create a large-scale stable labour mobility program to bring new international talent and essential workers. Such a step must go hand-in- hand with heightened efforts to strengthen protections against abuse in worker recruitment, as well as operational support for migrants who meet the admission criteria but lack the networks and information necessary to get good jobs.

Even if eligible for the program, foreign-born workers still face many operational barriers, from identifying suitable jobs with reliable employers to the processing of official documents both outside and inside Canada. These barriers can slow down or even prevent their arrival. A collaborative effort could create a new “ecosystem” within the labour mobility space to assist workers in navigating existing programs and overcoming these barriers, with an eye toward labour rights. Such efforts would vastly improve employer and worker experiences with labour mobility, leading to a better and more effective migration system.

Our current system is fragmented and hard to understand. The federal government’s attempts to open new ways to address specific migration issues and labour scarcity have led to a patchwork of more than 100 programs and pilots at the federal as well as provincial level. This is extremely difficult for foreign workers and Canadian employers to understand and navigate.

The caregiver sector is a great example of this dissonance. In 2019, the government introduced two new pilots for foreign-born caregivers – a sector with a long and complicated history of migration programs. These new pilots followed two previous five-year caregiver pilots as well as the original program under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), all of which are currently closed.

However, even though the government no longer accepts new applications for these old programs, it still continues to process certain claims submitted for the two previous pilots and to renew existing work permits for TFWP caregivers. As a result, foreign-born caregivers can work in Canada through six separate programs, depending on their current situation. That is just at the federal level. Earlier this year, Quebec launched an additional pilot at the provincial level to accept up to 550 individuals to work as orderlies.

On top of that, the federal caregiver pilots – the only ones accepting new applications – are capped at 5,500 workers, far fewer than the nearly 12,000 new permits that TWFP caregivers received in 2014 before the program began to wind down. Similar to caregivers, workers and employers in other essential industries such as food processing, transportation, construction and manufacturing experience equally confusing and small-scale mobility pathways, if they exist at all.

The federal government’s efforts to provide permanent residency to workers with a variety of skills are certainly laudable. Yet these new policies alone are unlikely to secure enough new workers to address the country’s current and future labour demand. Simply put, there are two issues that must be addressed: our current system is complicated and hard to navigate for both employers and workers; and it doesn’t let enough new foreign-born essential workers at a variety of skill levels enter the country.

Creation of a streamlined program is just the first step. We also need to make labour migration simpler and fairer for workers and employers. This is why alongside a new essential workers pathway, we need to begin building a new ecosystem of labour mobility actors, which would lay the groundwork for a quality “labour mobility industry.” A quality labour mobility industry would bring together actors within the migration space, who respect and promote the rights of workers by ensuring nondiscriminatory and humane treatment and by engaging in other ethical practices such as not requiring recruitment fees and providing lawful wages and working hours. The array of ethical actors would include recruiters, financial intermediaries, remittance providers, transportation providers, travel agents, migration lawyers, consultants and others.

Together, these actors would provide a variety of quality services to facilitate worker mobility under supervision and in accordance with our labour standards and rights, as well as existing bilateral and multilateral agreements. In other words, an industry of co-ordinated ethical actors would streamline the migration process, making it easier, faster and safer to navigate. Importantly, organized co-operation among good actors could also help eliminate at least some of the bad outcomes often seen in existing systems that frequently result in migrant indebtedness, fraud regarding job terms and quality, worker abuse, and irregularity. This would build both worker and employer trust in the system, and hopefully encourage more “good” migration to help fill our essential worker shortages.

The global pandemic and its aftermath have revealed the invaluable role of essential workers. Now we have an excellent opportunity to develop a coherent mobility pathway for additional essential workers. The latest policy efforts suggest that the political will may be there. This new pathway could lay the foundation for a more-equitable immigration system, underpinned by a quality mobility industry that supports safe and legal migration pathways, while ensuring positive outcomes for workers of all skillsets. It’s time for Canada to once again take the lead on labour mobility by setting an example of good practice, so other countries seeking to modernize their immigration schemes can follow.

Source: https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/august-2021/canada-needs-to-improve-its-immigration-channels-for-essential-migrant-workers/

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Canada faces a staggering immigration backlog. With the border reopening and applicants anxious to get here, how should Ottawa prioritize?

2021/08/04 Leave a comment

Good overview of the backlog and related issues that IRCC will have to address:

Thanks to COVID-19, Linda Shaji and Canada have had what you might call a bad romance.

After a lengthy vetting process, the 29-year-old from India was approved for permanent residence here on March 20, 2020 — two days after this country’s border was closed.

Now, 16 months later, her Canadian immigration visa has expired and Shaji is still home at her parents’ house, waiting to be admitted into this country.

The worst part is, after all this time, she’s still in the dark — met with automated email responses and told by Canada on its immigration website: “To wait for us to tell you what happens next. You don’t need to contact us again.”

“Ghosting us when we ask questions. Denying anything is wrong. Saying we are too needy when we question the long silence,” Shaji paused, “if this is a relationship, these are some serious red flags.”

The pandemic has wrecked havoc on the entire immigration system, with backlogs for every program — from family reunification to different economic immigration streams — that are only growing.

Now, as the border begins to reopen, the federal government is faced with long lines of disgruntled applicants, all looking to be the first to come in and start new lives in this country, while the bureaucracy struggles to digitalize an outdated case management and processing system.

Since March 18, 2020, when Canada closed its border in the face of the emerging pandemic, the immigration system has ground to a halt. The federal immigration department found itself scrambling to secure laptops for stay-at-home staff and to transition its processing online.

As of July 6, the backlog of permanent residence applications had skyrocketed by 70 per cent to 375,137 since February 2020, with the number of applications for temporary residence currently sitting at 702,660 cases.

The backlog of citizenship applications has also ballooned: it’s reached 369,677 people from 208,069 over the same period. These numbers do not include the applications that have been received at the mailroom of immigration offices but which have yet to be entered into the system.

Amid border lockdowns here and around the world, Canadian officials prioritized foreign nationals whose travels were deemed essential, such as migrant farm workers and health workers. They also responded to the plight of international students, who had paid a fortune to study in Canada and were in immigration limbo.

Wanting to keep the country’s immigration pipeline flowing, but not knowing how long travel restrictions would be in place, officials turned to the huge pool of migrant workers already in Canada to offer some of them permanent residency.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino has, meanwhile, been criticized by applicants left, right and centre who have had their lives, careers and dreams put on hold, some facing prolonged separation from spouses and parents or grandparents who are being kept out of the country.

“The growth of the inventory or what is described as backlogs is very much a function of the pandemic. There (was), quite literally, in the case of new permanent residents, no place for them to come to as a result of the travel restrictions,” Mendicino said.

“We hear you. We see you. Each and every one of your cases matters to me and to our department and to our government.”

While Mendicino has boasted about the quick adaptation of the immigration system to the pandemic, often citing the virtual citizenship test and oath-taking ceremony as examples, he has yet to make public a detailed plan or priorities for when the border reopens.

Recently, Canada’s reopening effort reached a new milestone, with the federal government set to welcome fully vaccinated U.S. citizens and green card holders at the land border for non-essential travel beginning on Aug. 9 without having to quarantine, and from other countries beginning Sept. 7.

What Mendicino needs to do immediately, experts and advocates say, is bring in the migrants who have already been vetted and approved for permanent residence but kept outside of Canada.

“All of the backlogs have now been exacerbated. The government has to provide some clear pathways and criteria for prioritization,” said independent Sen. Ratna Omidvar, a strong voice on migration, diversity and inclusion in the Senate.

“It should do everything it can to process those people who’ve already been processed. They should be a priority. They’ve put their lives on hold because we’ve selected them. They need to come to Canada. They need to put roots down.”

Shaji quit her job at an artificial intelligence development firm last July, when she got her visa after the visa office in India reopened. But Canada’s door was closed to immigrants even if they had valid visas because it was deemed non-essential travel.

“There is still no set timeline for anyone. It means further agony of waiting,” said Shaji, who has yet to hear from the federal government on what she needs to do regarding her expired documents in order to get here.

“Immigration surely matters to Canada, but do immigrants matter?”

In late June, Ottawa started opening the border to immigrants who have valid permanent residence visas to enter Canada, but the ones with expired documents were told more information would be forthcoming and not to contact officials.

For travellers like Shaji from India, Canada’s top immigrant-source country, getting here is another logistical challenge.

Ottawa has just extended its ban on all flights from India to Aug. 21, meaning even Canadian citizens can’t travel back. The ban was introduced in April due to the unruly surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the country.

The pandemic has exposed many shortcomings of the immigration process, said MP Jenny Kwan, the NDP’s immigration critic, and officials must cut unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy in these unprecedented times.

One of the things they could do, she said, is to automatically renew immigration applicants’ expired documents.

Requiring people to scramble to update outdated documents during a pandemic may buy Ottawa time, she noted, but it won’t solve the crisis and is going to further agonize immigration applicants.

“To this day, it is a mystery to me why the government has insisted on contacting each individual with an expired or expiring permanent resident visa to see if they still wanted to come to Canada, instead of just automatically renewing it,” Kwan said.

“Why did they do that? Why did they spend all those resources doing that instead of putting it into processing applications? They need to adopt an approach that’s not so rigid.”

Taraneh Gojgini sponsored her parents, Kaykavoos and Sima Gojgini, both American citizens, to join her in Vancouver from Long Island, N.Y., in 2018. The couple were issued their confirmation of permanent residence in September 2019 and had booked a flight to move here in April 2020. Due to COVID-19, the border was closed and their flight cancelled.

They didn’t hear anything from immigration officials for 10 months until this February, when they were asked if they were still interested in moving to Canada. The couple confirmed their desire to come here but wanted to delay the trip until the summer after most Canadians were expected to have been vaccinated.

Last April, after their visas expired, they were asked again if they were ready to come and told to send in their passports and photos for a new visa. In June, another email came asking them a third time if they planned to come to Canada. This time, they were also told to do a new medical exam.

“My parents are past the point of worry. They are so upset and anxious that there is no calming down their concern at this point,” said Gojgini, who moved to Vancouver in 2011 after marrying her husband, Behzad Pourkarimi. “They have become disillusioned with Canada.”

Kwan said reuniting families, whether spouses or parents, should be a priority for the immigration department, even if it means letting applicants abroad come here first on temporary visas and have their permanent residence applications processed within Canada so families won’t be kept apart even longer.

Suhani Chandrashekar, an engineer, came to Canada from India on a work permit in 2018 and went back to marry Naveen Nagarajappa, a close family friend, in December 2019. She returned to Canada and entered her profile into the skilled immigration pool for permanent residence.

In March 2020, just before COVID was declared a global pandemic, she received an invitation to submit her application under the Canadian Experience Class. Her case has since been stalled.

“Staying away from each other for so long is putting unnecessary strain on our marriage. We are also planning to start a family. But the uncertainty is not helping our cause here,” said the 29-year-old Toronto woman, who also has a pending application to have her husband join her here on a temporary work permit.

“Even after more than a year and a half of marriage, we are not able to see each other.”

Vancouver immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens said many of the permanent residence applications in the backlogs are actually near “finalization,” just pending approvals and admission.

Application backlogs in economic immigration, such as Canadian Experience Class or federal skilled workers, should be quick to clear, he contends, because they are processed online based on points allotted to applicants’ age, education, language test result and related work experience — and only require straightforward document reviews.

The paper-based family class applications, however, will be a problem because these are harder to process remotely and involve more discretionary decision-making by individual officers, and will take longer to finalize.

“The government has shown that where they’re willing to allocate resources and put the effort toward processing files, they can achieve it,” Meurrens said. “If they want, they can clear out this backlog easily.”

To him, the biggest question for Ottawa is whether it has the will to greatly exceed the annual immigration targets that they’d set — 401,000 in 2021; 411,000 in 2022; and 421,000 in 2023 — while simultaneously clearing backlogs and processing new applications that keep coming in.

“Are they prepared to explain to Canadians why immigration levels are going to go up because we’re processing this backlog while maintaining existing plans?” Meurrens asked. “If they don’t do that, they will have more application backlog delays.”

One of the blessings of the pandemic, he said, is that it gave Ottawa the opportunity to transition a large number of migrants on temporary status in Canada, such as precarious low-skilled workers who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for immigration, to become permanent residents.

“COVID has reduced that gap between the number of people who work here and the number of people who can immigrate,” said Meurrens. “Otherwise, we risk developing this permanent foreign worker class in Canada.”

Earlier this year, Ottawa introduced a one-time special program to grant permanent residence to 90,000 international graduates and essential migrant workers already in Canada in part to meet its 2021 immigration targets and in part to recognize migrant workers’ contributions to Canada during the pandemic.

Sen. Omidvar said the pandemic has shown Canadians that our economy not only needs highly educated STEM scientists and engineers but also immigrants who deliver essential services such as in agriculture and health care during the crisis.

A 21st-century immigration system needs to recognize those “essential skills” in the labour market that go beyond minimum language requirements and how many university degrees an immigration applicant has, she said.

“Let’s get away from this dichotomy and this unfortunate language of low skills and high skills. It doesn’t suit us anymore in this new era,” Omidvar said. “We need to view the labour market a little bit more broadly than we have done in the past. Coming out of this crisis, that’s the new horizon we need to grasp.”

For front-line immigration officers, many of whom are still working from home, having the proper digitizing infrastructure is key post-COVID-19, said Crystal Warner, national executive vice-president of the 27,000-member Canada Employment and Immigration Union.

During the pandemic, immigration staff were not equipped to work from home and some had to take turns going into the office, which only allowed a 20 per cent capacity at one point. Programs were de-prioritized and then reprioritized, and her members — 78 per cent women — weren’t given proper training and support, she said.

“There is a lack of a centralized digitization process. Staff are scanning mailed applications on desktop scanners at their desks in the office. It’s not an effective strategy. Progress is being made, but it is slow,” she said.

Warner said some of the systems are still not upgraded appropriately and crash all the time. Just recently, after a meeting where staff were told that significant investments were being made into the bandwidth and server space, the whole system crashed for the day, nationwide.

“This is ongoing,” she said. “On the one hand, they are digitizing like crazy and on the other hand, the hardware and system upgrades are not keeping pace.”

It’s an issue the federal government is hoping to address with an $800-million investment to modernize the immigration system in its 2021 budget, said the immigration minister.

“That’s the really exciting work that lies ahead of us, which is going to, I think, catapult us into an entirely transformed immigration system,” Mendicino said. “Our system needs to be transformed, needs to be modernized, so that it can accommodate the great demands that are placed on it.”

While the current immigration case management system certainly needs an upgrade, critics said Mendicino must first figure out the vaccination requirement for travellers — both permanent and temporary residents — who don’t meet current border exemptions.

Whether to let someone into the country should be based on vaccination status rather than just about which immigrant group Ottawa wants to prioritize, said Ravi Jain, past president of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration division.

“If people are fully vaccinated, I think we’ve got to start opening up,” he said, adding that processing immigration applications abroad depends very much on how well other countries manage the pandemic and their lockdown conditions, which hinders Ottawa’s priorities.

Ottawa, Jain noted, needs to figure out a vaccine passport that’s easy to enforce and can complement ArriveCan, the government app for travellers to provide travel info before and after entry to Canada, as well as which vaccines should be recognized based on science.

For fairness, he said, officials do need to allow prospective immigrants who have been waiting the longest to come first and start a new life here, as well as fast-tracking investors and businesspeople who can create employment in Canada for its economic recovery.

“I don’t want to say that you prioritize this and that particular group, and everyone else is waiting,” said Jain.

“There’s nothing preventing the government from moving forward on all fronts and on all these issues. What’s been preventing them, frankly, has been the border. That’s been the real sticking point.”

For overseas immigration applicant Maninderjit Singh, it’s simply heartbreaking to see those applying for permanent residence from abroad being shut out from the process.

The lawyer from Punjab, India, entered the federal skilled worker pool in January with 467 points, but the government has not had one single draw for the program.

And time is running out because a candidate loses points with increased age, five points per year as the system targets those in prime working age. Singh’s score has already come down by five points to 462 after he turned 32 recently.

“Thousands of federal skilled worker applicants are getting prejudiced with each passing day. Our life is now at a stand still,” he said. “With reduced score and thousands of new applications adding into the pool, the chances are getting bleak for me to get invited to Canada.”

Source: Canada faces a staggering immigration backlog. With the border reopening and applicants anxious to get here, how should Ottawa prioritize?

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Bill S-230: It’s Time to Restore Citizenship to “Lost” Canadians. Limited numbers although rhetoric continues

2021/07/09 Leave a comment

This issue continues to attract more political support than is warranted given that the major issues were dealt with in citizenship legislation in 2009 and 2014.

The Bill concerns a small cohort of second-generation Canadians born inside a 50-month window, from February 15, 1977, through April 16, 1981, so those who had already turned 28 when that age 28 rule was repealed through Bill C-37. 

Despite all the earlier and current rhetoric regarding the large numbers affected, IRCC officials advised SOCI of the numbers:

  • Following the 2009 changes, about 17,500 applied and were granted citizenship;
  • Following the 2015 changes, about 600 applied and were granted citizenship;
  • Since 2014, there were 109 persons who applied for a discretionary grant to address particular hardship situations. 105 have been granted with four still under review;
  • Estimates of remaining cases are in the order of a few hundred.

Substantively, given the small number remaining in the window, discretionary grants are the appropriate response. What is clear from the numbers, is that the actual number of “Lost Canadians” who wish to claim Canadian citizenship is small, contrary to earlier and current claims.

It is unclear why Senators wish to pursue this when there are many more substantive citizenship issues that warrant attention.

The contrast between these small numbers and the inflammatory, often fact-free and exaggerated rhetoric of long-term advocate Don Chapman in his opening statement and subsequent comments is striking. Opening statement below gives the flavour (highlights some of the more egregious assertions):

Don Chapman, Head, Lost Canadians: Thank you, honourable senators. I’m honoured to be in the presence of all of you. I admire your social and moral engagement in serving Canada to make it a better and more inclusive country. We’re on common ground.

Bill S-230 is a continuation of recommendations the Senate made 13 years ago.

Senators, Lost Canadians is the Canadian version of the British Windrush scandal, except ours is mostly off the radar, far larger, affects way more people and is one of the biggest scandals in Canada’s history. Now, that probably sounds presumptuous, especially after the horrific discovery of the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children. To explain why I make the comparison, those children, including all Indigenous people, are part of the Lost Canadian narrative. There are at least 15 categories of Lost Canadians, and Indigenous and First Nations are just one. But their story is our story and our story is their story. It’s about a country that has and continues to turn against its own people. Since Confederation, Canada has not always embraced Brown or Jewish people or other subgroups. Canadian history was written to conveniently include a colossal fabrication, which has produced heinous results. To know the truth, you must understand the history of citizenship.

Senators, you and the MPs are the guardians and caretakers of our collective identity called citizenship. You’re our parents, we’re your children and the family’s dysfunctional. Picture a neighbour befriending kids from all around but then secretly abusing their own children. That’s how it is for Lost Canadians. Canada welcomes people from around the world, but not us, your own children. To be clear, we’re pro-immigration; Canada needs people. But why are long-standing Canadian families rejected while immigrants are welcome? Why can’t there be room for everyone?

In 2003, in my first House of Commons Citizenship and Immigration Committee testimony, I described myself as a Canadian in exile. Years later and after numerous rejections, I actually considered declaring refugee status in my own country, and I wasn’t the only Lost Canadian so desperate. Regrettably, this horror show is ongoing. It’s about identity, belonging and culture.

Indigenous Canadians are proud of who they are. I’m proud of who they are and admire their perseverance in standing up for what is right. Canada wrongly tried to strip them of their identity, with deadly consequences. Be forewarned: They are not the only category of Lost Canadians who died due to the neglect.

Now think of citizenship as being a member of a family. It’s the fibre of your being. How would you feel if your parents booted you out? Picture a six-year-old, born in Canada and extremely proud of being Canadian. Psychologically, how is that child affected when they discover that their own country or family doesn’t want them anymore? That child was me. How deplorable that this is still happening to other children, with the obvious devastating results. Their hurt lasts a lifetime.

Now flip the coin. How does it feel being the Canadian parent of a minor child being rejected? I know this too because, as an adult, after 47 years, Canada finally said I could go home with citizenship, but on condition I leave behind my minor-aged daughters. Today, some Canadian citizen parents are in the same boat, forced to explain to their kids why Canada doesn’t want them.

Lost Canadians is not about immigration. It’s about citizenship and rights. Please make the distinction.

Also, senators and MPs are appointed or elected to represent Canadian citizens. The problem is you don’t really know who is or is not a citizen, yet citizens are your constituents. So who exactly do you represent? The legislation remains a Rubik’s cube of confusion. Maybe it’s you, a family member, a grandchild or someone you know that’s a Lost Canadian. Roméo Dallaire lost his citizenship, as have other parliamentarians.

Question: If you’ve been aware of ongoing Lost Canadian abuses, why were you silent? Personally, I don’t think you were fully aware, but it wasn’t for my lack of trying to tell you. Going forward, no excuses, you now know. As for citizenship, Canada, the country you represent, is violating three United Nations human rights conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and it’s already broken promises made on gender equality at the recent G7 summit. Maybe that’s because citizenship is not and has not been Canada’s priority. Take the name, IRCC. Immigration and refugees come before citizenship, the latter being the bastard child. For Lost Canadians, Canada’s outcasts, that’s exactly how it feels.

Bill S-230 is a much-needed fix. Thank you to my good friend Senator Martin and to Senator Omidvar. But for importance, the age 28 rule is third in priority of the five remaining Lost Canadian deficiencies. For the complete fix, Bill S-230 would need amendments that I’ve included, and the fixes are relatively simple. But absent that, tiered citizenship and unequal rights remain. Are you okay with that? It’s certainly against the Charter. That said, if amendments would delay the passage of this bill, then please pass it as is. Just don’t ignore other desperate Lost Canadians still in limbo, like children. As an airline pilot, I’d never ditch in the Hudson River and knowingly leave people behind. As overseers and protectors of Canadians and their identity and citizenship, please don’t you leave anyone behind either.

With urgency, put forward another Lost Canadians bill so that women have equal rights; that all Canadians are able to prove their substantial connection; that naturalized Canadians don’t have more rights than other Canadian citizens. Make it so that every naturalized Canadian, not just 99% of them, be deemed to have been born in Canada so that they too can confer citizenship to their children. Canada’s war dead must be recognized as having been the Canadian citizens they were.

After that, together, let’s work on introducing a mint-fresh, inclusive and Charter-compliant Citizenship Act. That’s what this committee recommended 13 years ago in your report on Lost Canadians, and then you promptly forgot about it, just like Canada did with the age 28 rule.

Now there are MPs and Canadians who believe the Senate is irrelevant. They’re wrong. For me and the hundreds of thousands of other Lost Canadians, we regained or qualified for citizenship because of wonderful and compassionate senators like yourselves, from all sides of the aisle. You were our saviours as Bill S-2 was our first parliamentary victory, and it was unanimous. Now let’s do it again, in the Senate today, with Bill S-230. Make it the first bill to correct these egregious wrongs, and then introduce a brand new, Charter-compliant national identity, making Canada the beacon of light to the world for its vision, its inclusiveness, its values and for its positive actions on human rights and equality.

Honourable senators, citizenship could be one of your greatest legacies. I look forward to working with you, and thank you.

Source: https://sencanada.ca/en/Content/Sen/Committee/432/SOCI/55289-e

And the earlier statement in the Senate by Senator Omidvar

Hon. Ratna Omidvar: Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill S-230, An Act to amend the Citizenship Act (granting citizenship to certain Canadians), introduced by our colleague Senator Martin.

Before I comment on this bill, I would like to mark June 1 as a transformational day in the Senate. We have passed Bill S-4. We have held on to tradition where we have needed to, but we have also gone with confidence into the future. I want to thank our colleague, Senator Marc Gold, for his dedication to bringing this to our chamber.

I am the official critic for Bill S-230. I always think of a critic as someone who has something to object to. In truth, there is very little to object to in this bill, so I stand very much as a supporter of this long overdue piece of legislation.

When I became a senator in 2016, I started to get emails from Canadians who knew of my interest in citizenship. I heard the term Lost Canadians for the first time. I have to be honest, I was, frankly, lost when I heard that terminology because those of us who have found Canada know what a privilege it is to be Canadian. To have inadvertently lost your citizenship — because of what I can best describe as bureaucratic missteps and fumbling and lost opportunities — is unimaginable to me.

In June 2016, I rose in the chamber as the sponsor of the citizenship bill, Bill C-6, and I drew a picture of Canada and its citizenship as a house with a strong roof, a strong door, a lot of windows to let the sunshine in, but also to keep danger out. I believe that metaphor still stands today, but the foundations of this house are grounded in a few principles.

First and most important is equality amongst citizens. Equality sees all Canadians — by birth or naturalization, mono-citizens or dual citizens, whether citizens of 50 years, 10 years or 1 month — treated equally under the law. Equal rights, equal responsibility and, when necessary, equal punishment. These are not aspirational goals. This is the floor; the absolute foundation of how equality is expressed in Canada.

Second is the principle of facilitating citizenship, making it accessible for those who qualify. I think of this again as the main family room of the house: a big fire blazing to keep out the wretched cold and a big, welcoming door. However, for a few Canadians, the fire has lost its warmth, and they were inadvertently expelled, banished, so to say, from this house.

Many have lived in Canada for years, as Senator Martin has pointed out, without even realizing they may not have Canadian citizenship any longer. Although legislative fixes have tried to bring citizenship back in different ways, it has never captured everyone. This is a true example of the unintended, negative impact of legislation that we deal with in so many different ways.

When I rose to speak on Bill C-6, which was an omnibus citizenship act, former senator Willie Moore, who was with us, asked me whether or not Lost Canadians would be brought back into the fold. Sadly, I had to say to him, no, that was out of the scope of the bill.

After Bill C-6 was passed, former Senator Eggleton took it on and was almost ready to table the bill when his resignation date approached. Again, the bill was left orphaned, in a way. Since that time, Don Chapman and others have been talking to Senator Martin, Senator Jaffer and all of us to try to bring this back to our attention. I am incredibly grateful to Senator Martin for taking this bull by the horns and bringing our attention to it.

As we know, and as Senator Martin has explained, our immigration system is incredibly complex. Immigration law is complex. Within immigration law, there is citizenship law that is incredibly complex. It sometimes catches people in a net from which it is hard to escape.

As Senator Martin has explained, it’s a narrow bill. In 1977, the government introduced a new Citizenship Act. Under that act, children born abroad on or after February 14, 1977, received their Canadian citizenship if one of their parents was a Canadian citizen, regardless of their marital status.

However, if that Canadian parent was born outside Canada and, therefore, the child was what we would call second generation, the child had to apply for citizenship by the age of 28. If they did not put an application by age 28, their citizenship was taken away from them, often without them ever realizing it.

Later, in April 2009 — many years later, still trying to catch up on the problem — Bill C-37 changed the Citizenship Act again and repealed the age 28 rule. However, the bill didn’t completely deal with Canadians who were born abroad between that narrow window of 1977 and 1981, and who turned 28 before Bill C-37 became the law. Some of these individuals were well informed enough and applied for their citizenship. Others simply fell in between the cracks.

Senator Dalphond asked the question, how many are these? I’m also curious. My information is that there are definitely not thousands. There may even be just a few hundred. But I hope we all recognize, even for just a few hundred, how important it is to be able to be franchised as Canadians.

Many who were born overseas but raised in Canada had an entrenched life in Canada. They went to school here; they have jobs and families here. Their roots are firmly here. They have paid income taxes. But they were unaware of the issue — just as I’m often unaware of when my driver’s licence expires, and then I have to really struggle to regain it — which certainly happens to people. We are talking, as I said, about a few hundred people, at most.

The government relies, as Senator Martin has stated, on ministerial appointments. Every time I’ve spoken to every successive immigration minister, they have said, “It’s not a problem. I can deal with it. Send me the file.” But, colleagues, that is not a systemic way of dealing with an injustice of this kind. We need a law. Even though Byrdie Funk — someone whom I admire a great deal — and Anneliese Demos — the same — even though they had the agency, the voice, the capacity to advocate for themselves, I worry about those who do not, who cannot get the minister’s attention or that of his department. I think it is time for us to fix this in a systemic manner.

There are severe consequences for having to wait to get formal recognition back. While waiting to get your citizenship, you can’t have a social insurance number. You may not be able to get a job. You may not be able to travel. Likely you’re not able to travel because you don’t have a passport. You have limited access to health care. All this at the same time when there is always the threat of deportation hanging over you.

In the case of Byrdie Funk, it is not clear whether all her years of contribution to the Canada Pension Plan will be honoured when she gets her pension.

Bill S-230 will allow citizens who were born abroad and have built a life here to prove that they are Canadian and that they have the right to pass citizenship onto their children. It will not lead to a perpetual passage of Canadian citizenship to generations who may never live in Canada. This does nothing for third-generation Canadians.

Honourable senators, I urge you, in short, to support this bill and send it to committee for further study. Lost Canadians have already waited too long. Let’s bring them back into the Canadian fold sooner than rather later. Thank you.

Source: https://www.ratnaomidvar.ca/speech-on-bill-s230-its-time-to-restore-citizenship-to-lost-canadians-2/


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Canada needs more immigrants — and not only for the economy

2021/06/12 Leave a comment

Good nuanced commentary and the need for a broader lens than just demographic and economic:

There’s a problem in persistently defining immigrants as economic drivers that will take Canada to a more prosperous place.

It’s not that the pitch is wrong.

It’s that it is myopic, and it’s pushing Canada to evaluate the movement of people as a pure dollars-and-cents exercise. And that’s short-sighted at a time when we need all the compassion we can get.

Canadians’ impressions of their country as an open and tolerant nation that thrives on diversity have been deeply challenged over the past two weeks — first with the discovery of the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., and then by what police say was an intentional attack on a Muslim family in London, Ont. that left four people dead.

“There’s a growing feeling that we aren’t holding together as best we should,” says Sen. Ratna Omidvar, a vocal proponent of ramping up immigration — and in a way that is not just about economics.

“We need to be more intentional about social cohesion,” she says.

Repeatedly making the case for increasing diversity almost solely on an economic basis doesn’t help — as the federal Liberals themselves used to sense.

In 2016, a group of influential economic advisers led by Dominic Barton, now Canada’s ambassador to China, came up with a list of strategies to ensure Canada’s prosperity over the long term — a list that carries weight to this day. Barton told the federal Liberals that among other things, they should dramatically ramp up immigration as a way to propel Canada’s economy forward. 

A few cabinet ministers thought it was a great concept at first, but even as the Liberals embraced most of Barton’s other growth recommendations, they eventually balked at the idea, unsure of their ability to sell the public on a complex argument.

Five years later, however, not only are they making the argument, it’s almost to the exclusion of anything else when it comes to immigration. And yes, it’s complex.

Canada’s economy isn’t growing fast enough to maintain our standard of living and fund all the social safety nets we have come to expect, it goes. Plus, labour shortages are all around us, and if they’re not here now, they soon will be.

Since Canadians are retiring faster than they can reproduce, we need to replenish the workforce and bolster the financial foundation of our social safety net by adding many, many more immigrants.

The pandemic set us back in our immigration plans because of closed borders, but the federal government is now actively making up for lost time and then some — a key plank in the recovery strategy. The economic messaging is central — everywhere in Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino’s comments in the House and speeches to the public, the policy documents issued through the immigration department and the pitches Liberal MPs make to their constituents. 

Immigrants create small businesses, fill job vacancies, make our health-care system work, spend money, and support their children to make more money than they did, the message goes.

While Omidvar makes those arguments herself, she says there’s a danger in thinking narrowly.

“You make it about one thing only,” she says. “We have turned immigration into too much of a transactional experience.”

She talks about her own experience moving to Canada from Iran in 1981 and finding her way by joining a local gardening club and planting daffodils with her neighbours.

While she appreciates all the politicians’ speeches about diversity and inclusion in the wake of the London attack, she warns that social cohesion — an essential for quality of life, economic and beyond — comes from a community-based, proactive approach and not the reactive approach she has seen on display over the past couple of weeks. And that means a focus on immigrants as whole people who are valuable members of our communities.

Economist Mikal Skuterud, a professor at the University of Waterloo, doesn’t buy many of the economic arguments around immigration that the federal government is making these days. “It’s hyperbolic, it’s completely exaggerated, and it’s not honest in a lot of cases,” he says.

He argues that immigration could bolster Canada’s prosperity if newcomers are more productive than existing workers, but that’s not always the case. He also points out that if immigrants have the same age distribution as the existing workforce, they won’t do much to change the way the labour force pays for a growing contingent of retirees.

But he does agree with Omidvar that it’s important to evaluate immigration on factors that go well beyond labour and economics, especially if we want to enrich our culture and not just our wallets.

Public opinion polling suggests that Canadians generally view immigration as beneficial to Canada, but the top reasons people give for being pro-immigration are around diversity and multiculturalism. Contributions to the economy come second, says Andrew Parkin, executive director of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. 

For the sake of social peace, perhaps our political rhetoric should take its cue from the public in this case.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2021/06/10/canada-needs-more-immigrants-and-not-only-for-the-economy.html

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