Citizenship and Immigration Committee on April 2nd, 2008

[Helen Smith-McIntyre]

The 100,000 is the number of resettlement places among some 23 countries that have agreed with the United Nations to be resettlement countries, and we're one of those resettlement countries. It doesn't include the number of people who come seeking refugee status within our borders.

I guess the philosophy I bring to this is that we are crying for people to come to Canada. In my experience--and there has been research done to tell us this--refugees integrate as well as, better than, or almost as well as the skilled workers and professionals we bring. So why are we keeping the numbers of refugees so small in terms of our overall immigration numbers?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Yes, I see your point.

Mr. Carrier.

[Robert Carrier, Bloc, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Good morning. It's a pleasure for me to be in Moose Jaw, in the beautiful riding of my friend Dave Batters. This is the first time in my life that I've been here, and it may be the last. I come from the province of Quebec, where we also hear about Iraqi refugees. However, I see this issue affects your region to a greater degree.

I'm aware of the problems you raise concerning those we take in as refugees. Improvements have to be made to this system. You're experiencing these problems at first-hand. I wonder what you think about the intervention by the developed countries in Iraq, led by the Americans. Those people have been there for five years. Earlier my Liberal colleague mentioned the fact that we created this situation. Billions of dollars have been spent in that country in the past five years to introduce democracy and improve the population's living conditions. Do you think that many refugees who left that country because of tough conditions want to return to it?

When you are born in a country, you feel comfortable there. You really have to be forced to leave it and become a refugee in another country. Based on the information you have, would you say that the situation will ultimately be restored and that a certain quality of life will be re-established?

[Alex Istifo]

Very good. I don't know. In my opinion, I don't think the Americans went there to save the people of Iraq; I think the Americans went there to save their own policy and their own goods and their own ideas.

Sure, maybe in 10 years Iraq may be a better place to live. There are too many factions. For a hundred years people have been killing each other in Iraq--the two different factions have. So it's not so easy to say that the people of Iraq have a better life today, or that they're going to have a better life next year. As I said, maybe in 10 or 15 or 20 years, they might come together and realize they're all humans and that they can all live together. But right now, certain factions are killing certain factions every day. People really don't have mercy for each other; after somebody has killed your son, you want to take revenge. That's what's happening in Iraq.

I visited northern Iraq last May. I was there for 14 days. The situation was worse than it was 30 years ago when I lived there. So to be honest with you, I don't think it's going to be that easy.

The Americans are taking some refugees, a very, very small percentage, and that's just happened recently. After 9/11, the rest of the world basically has had to take the burden. That's my opinion. So I think a country like Canada has the room and the special programs, and I think we should really look at the refugees from Iraq, because they are desperate.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you.

[Robert Carrier, Bloc, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

I'm going to close on this subject before moving on to the refugee question. We see that we can have little hope in major military interventions designed to solve a country's problems. You very clearly described for us the rivalries between the various factions and religious groups, including the Sunnis.

My colleague mentioned that there are similar problems elsewhere in the world. Recently in Kenya, tribal rivalries surfaced following an election and resulted in a number of deaths. We can cite other cases like that, which occur around the world. That is why we somewhat tend to view the specific case of one country in relative terms with another. There are problems virtually everywhere on earth, around the world. This also enables us to reflect on our military actions in Afghanistan, but that is not the subject of our meeting today.

I want to talk about the refugees we have accepted in Canada. I would like to know how these refugees are distributed in Canada. There seems to be quite a significant number of them in Saskatchewan. Are they concentrated in this province?

Perhaps Ms. Smith-McIntyre could tell us more about that.

[Helen Smith-McIntyre]

You're asking about the Afghan refugees?

[Robert Carrier, Bloc, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

No, I'm talking about Iraqi refugees who have been accepted in Canada. How are they distributed across the country, in percentage terms? There are a lot in Saskatchewan. Personally, I know a few in Quebec, but I don't have any statistics on the subject. You no doubt have that information.

[Helen Smith-McIntyre]

Yes, we know where the communities are, because many of the communities have done what the community in Saskatoon has done. A few people came in early eighties—and maybe, in one or two cases, in the late seventies—and they've sponsored and sponsored and sponsored people to build a community.

I can't tell you how large all of them are, but we have communities in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, the Windsor-London area of Ontario, Toronto, and there's a community in Montreal. Those would be the largest population bases of Iraqi Christians. Because of how the Iraqi Christians have sponsored or done family reunification and brought people here, those communities would probably be Christian.

I know that in Saskatoon we have a few Kurdish families, and we maybe have two or three families that would be Arab.

One of the other phenomena is that most Iraqis have not come as government-assisted refugees, and so they have not been designated to various cities across the country. They've come as privately sponsored refugees, sponsored by their own communities, and they tend to have concentrated in certain areas.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you for your submission today. It's been very helpful. Your recommendations will certainly be taken into consideration when we do our report and send it to the immigration minister and present it in the House of Commons. It's been very valuable.

I want to thank you for your work and your interventions today. Thank you.

We'll take a 5- to 10-minute five break to give people a chance to go to the washroom, make phone calls, get back to your offices, and everything else that's got to be done. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

We will continue our deliberations of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration as we continue our study.

I want to welcome today, from the Government of Saskatchewan, Mr. Eric Johansen, director, Saskatchewan immigrant nominee program, immigration branch, advanced education, employment and labour.

We also have Mr. John Hopkins, CEO of the Regina and District Chamber of Commerce.

Thank you for coming, and welcome.

We don't have our full committee with us at the moment. I was saying to Mr. Johansen that some of our members have bills going in the House of Commons and they have had to fly back and forth to be present in the House of Commons for these bills. But I do thank you.

We generally begin with opening statements, if you have any, and then our committee will engage in some questions and discussions. Mr. Johansen or Mr. Hopkins, you can start whenever you're ready.

Thank you.

[Eric Johansen, Director, Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program, Immigration Branch, Advanced Education, Employment and Labour, Government of Saskatchewan]

On behalf of the Government of Saskatchewan, thank you for the opportunity to meet with the standing committee this morning. I'm going to be making some comments from a provincial perspective on the temporary foreign worker program, as it's functioning in Saskatchewan. Particularly, I'd like to stress the importance we see of that program to the economy in Saskatchewan, and there are a couple of points I want to make around that.

First of all, we are experiencing--and I suspect you'll hear the same from Mr. Hopkins--a critical labour shortage in Saskatchewan, and we simply need to improve access to foreign labour for Saskatchewan employers. We are in the midst of an economic boom that's arguably unprecedented in recent memory in Saskatchewan. Employers are really struggling to find individuals to come to work for them. Our unemployment rate is very low. The incidence of uptake of employment insurance has dropped significantly. It dropped 17%, I believe, last year, the highest rate of any province in Canada. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business recently reported that Saskatchewan has the highest long-term vacancy rate of any province in Canada.

Our demographics structure is going to contribute to that labour shortage. We have an unusually low percentage of working-age individuals in this province, which is presenting a challenge to employers. That's expected to get worse. Of the working-age individuals, a high percentage are going to be coming up for retirement in the next five to ten years. Projections are being made that Saskatchewan will experience a labour shortage of around 9,000 to 13,000 jobs in the next three to five years. If current economic trends continue, that's likely an optimistic forecast.

So we simply need to improve access to any source of labour, and the temporary foreign worker program is an important source of access. We have to use the other tools we have at hand as well, such as training youth, retaining youth, and attracting individuals from other provinces. But certainly foreign labour has to be part of the equation in meeting Saskatchewan's labour market needs.

The second reason I'd really stress the importance of the temporary foreign worker program for our province is that it really is a sister program to our nominee program. They need to work hand in glove. We have done a lot of things that have made it work quite successfully, but the extent to which that program can be expanded and work out some kinks that aren't perhaps working ideally now will really contribute to the province's long-term goal of increasing our overall number of immigrants in the province.

The temporary foreign worker program generally has quicker access to workers than can be provided through an immigration program, such as the Saskatchewan immigrant nominee program, or any other federal stream, so it's very critical for employers. We've designed our nominee program to take advantage of that fact, and we have several categories in which individuals come into the province initially on a temporary work permit gained through a labour market opinion process with Service Canada. When they're here for six months, they can then apply to our nominee program for permanent status. So we see that two-step program as often serving employers very effectively. If we can get more temporary foreign workers here, we think it'll build our program and help us meet our goals as well.

In terms of issues, I'll identify four issues for you to think about today in your deliberations. Two of them, I think, are fairly operational kinds of issues, and two are more what I would call policy issues.

In terms of operational issues, anything that can be done to reduce the processing times for labour market opinions for employers who are seeking temporary foreign workers will be hugely appreciated in our province. Right now, the LMOs take somewhere in the range of eight to fourteen weeks. There have been advances made in other provinces, which we're somewhat envious of, particularly to the west of here. There's been work done around expedited labour market opinion processes that we'd be interested in developing in Saskatchewan. We've been told in discussions with officials to date that that's not going to be available to Saskatchewan, at least in the short term, but maybe there are some other avenues we can use to reduce the LMO time and serve employers as effectively as we can.

A second aspect—an operational issue, I'll term it—that we would flag is protection of workers' rights. Temporary foreign workers are particularly vulnerable in our labour market, as they don't have the mobility other individuals in the labour market have. So we think it's very important that we take extra measures to work with this group of individuals, ensure that they understand the protection afforded to them under provincial legislation, labour standards, etc., and ensure that they have knowledge of where to go if they think their rights are not being fully protected. We also want to ensure that employers understand what their obligations to temporary foreign workers are, and we want to find mechanisms to ensure that commitments made by employers to temporary foreign workers are indeed under a labour market opinion, being followed through.

So those are two kinds of operational issues, and I should mention that we are working with our federal counterparts around some of those issues. We have developed a working group among the province and Service Canada and Citizenship and Immigration Canada to start to work on some of these issues. I hope some progress can be made. However, some of the avenues to address these kinds of issues are beyond what officials have the ability to do, and to the extent that resources and prioritization can be affected through a process like this, I would urge you to consider those issues.

In terms of policy issues, I'll identify two things. First, we have had a considerable amount of difficulty around the issue of open work permits for spouses under the temporary foreign worker program. Policy generally is that spouses of temporary foreign workers who are not in the skilled categories—i.e., national occupation classification system A, B, or 0—are not eligible for a work permit. That created huge problems for us in our trucker initiative when we began to bring in long-haul truckers. We created a situation where individual principal applicants were coming in and bringing their families with them. The principal applicant had a job, the kids went to school, but the spouse could not work, and it created a tremendous degree of stress for those families.

The intent in this project was clearly that these individuals would be here in the long term, and I think this policy really worked against our long-term intent there. To the extent that we can identify where temporary foreign workers are intended to be here in the long term, it would be very helpful if in those situations open work permits could be available to the spouses.

The second policy issue I'll identify for you has to do with federal settlement services. Here our issue is that again, as I think I've tried to stress for you, our program works very much hand in glove with the temporary foreign worker program. A large number of people come into our program after working on a temporary foreign worker permit gained through the LMO process.

Another significant percentage of them come to our program first. We nominate them, and then they apply simultaneously for landed immigrant status and for a temporary work permit, and they come here on a temporary work permit while their landed immigrant status application is working its way through the federal system.

In both those instances, those individuals and their families are not eligible for settlement services under federal programs. So ISAP, the immigrant settlement and assistance program, language instruction for newcomers, and the host program are simply not available for those individuals on their initial landing in Saskatchewan, and that's the period when they really need settlement assistance. It's not six months, 12 months, or 18 months later when they receive landed immigrant status that they need to start to learn language in Saskatchewan. It's when they get here.

So that policy issue has, I think, worked against our effectively working towards the goal of bringing people into the province and settling them effectively. So that's the context I'd like to set for you.

I'd also like to stress that our minister has very much identified working with the temporary foreign worker program as a priority for him—hence the work that we're doing with officials—and we're very appreciative of the opportunity today to identify some of these issues to the standing committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Mr. Johansen. We appreciate it.

Do you have comments, Mr. Hopkins?

[John Hopkins, As an Individual]

Yes. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here.

I'm going to be about as candid as I can possibly be on this issue. I think it's critically important.

The number one issue in the business community today in Regina is the shortage of labour. There is no other issue that's even remotely close to this issue. It was just a few short years ago that the top issue would always be taxes—it was always taxes—and now the critical thing is labour.

I'm not an expert on immigration and I'm not going to pretend to be, but I can tell you what's going on in the business community today.

I have talked to business owners who have to beg workers to come to work. Workers they would have fired five years ago they are phoning, saying “Please come to work”, because there's not the availability of workers.

I had the owner of the Tim Hortons restaurant along Albert Street say to me, “John, I don't need a doctor, I don't need a lawyer, I don't need an accountant, but I do need somebody who can pour coffee. That's what I need.”

I have retailers who want people to come to work. We have McDonald's restaurants in Regina that cannot either open their drive-through or open the restaurant because they do not have the people they require to get it done.

We are on the cusp of something unbelievable in Saskatchewan. The growth potential is almost limitless in this province, except for one critical thing, and that is the labour shortage. The demographic trends are there, and they're there in spades. There's a freight train coming, and if we don't do something about it, our economic growth potential is not even going to be close to realized.

Our chamber has looked at this issue in some detail. We've identified a few things we need to work on.

The first thing is to engage first nations and Métis people like never before. We must do that and we are taking steps to do it.

The second thing is to engage our youth and to say to them today that they don't need to go anywhere else. Before, the old joke was, when do you start talking about moving to Alberta; is it in grade 5 or grade 6? We're trying to curb that and say, no, the opportunities are here right now in Saskatchewan; our youth do not have to go anywhere else.

The next thing, and this is being done in a major way, is to retain people who are leaving the workforce—retirees, if I can call them that—or to somehow get them to come back and stay in the workforce, whether it's part-time or on contract, or consulting, or whatever the case may be, in order to hold on to workers.

The next thing is immigration. This is a critical thing for us.

We've been told about the 850,000 people who are on the list. As I understand it, those are people who have inquired about coming to Canada—not necessarily people who want to come, but who have made that inquiry, though I would venture to say a very significant number of those would like to come to this country. We believe it's absolutely critical that we start to work on that list to get people to come here. There are lots of opportunities.

When we talk about this, it's like going back to the early 1900s or even before then; the opportunity is so great. We just need people from across the globe to come here to help, because of the opportunity that's here.

One of the things I've run into is that when I say we need people to pour coffee, people say to me that we can't invest in people like that; we need the doctors, the lawyers, skilled people. My comment to that is that my dad came to this country with not a lot of skill; he came because there were opportunities. It was for the same opportunities, in many ways, as are here today that he came to this country. And of course he married my mom, and her parents came to this country for the very same reason. I think in a lot of ways history is repeating itself. The opportunity is here to open the door.

On the immigration side, I have had the opportunity to be in a few places in the world, and one is Afghanistan. I can tell you for a fact that there are many people in Afghanistan who would love to come to Regina or Moose Jaw or wherever it is to pour coffee, because it opens the door for all kinds of other opportunities.

I'll also tell you about a guy I met by the name of Stephen King--not the author, but a great guy. I met him in Shanghai last summer. He talked about wanting to come to Canada. He's a very bright guy, a very nice guy, just excellent. He was with us for a number of days. He told me it was going to take him at least five years to get to Canada. I found that disturbing.

Now, he told me that it's far easier to get into Australia--and I'm not saying I know this as fact, because I don't--than it is to come to Canada. For competitive reasons, then, that's a problem we need to look at in this country. We need people to come to this country. We just do. The labour shortage, at least in Regina, in Saskatchewan, is such that we need to act quickly on this. We need to take whatever measures we can put in place to alleviate that problem, I think.

That said, I know this is a difficult issue. Particularly since 9/11, all kinds of things are associated with it. But I'm quite passionate that we need to resolve this so that we can get more people to this country to celebrate the opportunities that are here, to help grow our economy, to help grow our country. There are all kinds of reasons. And the same reasons we had 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 400 years ago are still valid today. I think there are a lot of opportunities.

I'm sorry if I kind of ranted here--I was quite candid about it, I know--but I think this is an important issue. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Those were great comments, very interesting comments.

Are there any questions, people?

Ms. Beaumier.

[Colleen Beaumier, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Mr. Hopkins, you were very passionate, and I like people who are passionate about immigration. However, I have to tell you that coming from Ontario...and you can't hold that against me, because nobody's perfect.

[John Hopkins]

I'm from there too.

[Colleen Beaumier, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Are you from Ontario?

[John Hopkins]

I grew up in Toronto.

[Colleen Beaumier, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Oh. But you saw the light, you got out.

To hear people from Saskatchewan talk about a labour shortage is almost amusing. And I don't mean I'm laughing at you; it's just something I'm having to digest fairly quickly, because I had no idea that existed.

If we were to get rid of the point system, do you believe we would end up getting more of the kinds of immigrants we really need in this country? Right now in Toronto we have doctors and lawyers and veterinarians driving cabs. It's a very humbling experience to take a cab ride in Toronto knowing that your cabbie probably is more qualified to do what you're doing than you are.

Do you think the point system is the basic problem? The backup we blame on security. I think we've gone overboard on the security thing. How do you see us adjusting the immigration process in order to process these people faster? I don't think temporary workers are the solution--unless we take all of the underground workers in this country right now and legalize them.

[John Hopkins]

Thank you very much. I'm not going to pretend to know what the point system is, because I don't really know what it is, but I'll speak to what I think the issue is--namely, that many people who come to this country have credentials that aren't being recognized and that need to be recognized.

That said, there need to be checks and balances in place. For doctor credentials, let's say, there need to be standards somewhere that we would all accept. I think that has to be met. I'm not sure exactly where we are in that respect, but I think there needs to be some work done on that.

I do know that in a Saskatchewan context, among the things we as a chamber worked at a number of years ago was prior learning recognition for some of the post-secondary institutions in Saskatchewan. I think something like that is necessary. We need to work on that.

In terms of getting people into the country, I'll be candid: we need to do whatever we need to do to get more people into this country to take advantage of the opportunities that are here. I'm not an expert on the process at all, but that's what needs to happen as far as we're concerned.

[Colleen Beaumier, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Yes, because the backlog is growing. It's a mess.

[John Hopkins]

I agree.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

There are almost a million in the backlog now, so it is quite challenging.

Mr. St-Cyr.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

I urge you to use the interpretation, if you need it.

I'm pleased to be here with you today, in Moose Jaw, even though all I've been able to see of it is the hotel pool.

Both of you talked about the arrival of foreign workers. In fact, temporary foreign workers are the subject of our study. Mr. Hopkins even went further by saying that we don't need just temporary workers, but also people who come and settle in Saskatchewan and help to develop society.

Various speakers have told us about a number of concerns about protecting these people from exploitation. There are some very good employers who take care of and decently treat people who come to work on temporary visas, but other, less scrupulous employers treat them in a way they would never treat Canadian employees.

Among other things, Mr. Hopkins mentioned that, for someone from Afghanistan who is experiencing difficulties, serving coffee in a Tim Horton's is already an improvement in living conditions. However, some unscrupulous employers abuse the situation by thinking that, even if they mistreat these individuals, they already have more than they would in their own country. That's the problem.

What measures could we put in place to prevent this situation? We often put this question to workers groups and refugee advocacy organizations. They all have suggestions to make. However, I would like to know the opinions of merchants. What can we do to prevent certain unscrupulous merchants from undermining the program as a whole?