Quite frankly, I wouldn't take the job under any circumstances. It's a thankless one.
I think I would do what Bob Andras did when he was elected from the Lakehead and he arrived and found out he was going to be the minister. He started asking basic questions, like why do we have any immigration? And of course the bureaucrats, and I was one of them, couldn't give him a sensible answer. So he said we have to do a fundamental basic study on immigration. “Times are changing. We did need them when the west was wide open and we needed thousands of people to go out there and settle on the land, but do we really need them now?” So he set up a green paper study that went across the country.
Essentially, I think we have to figure out why we are bringing in immigrants. Most of the economists who know a lot about immigration and make it their field of study, like George Borjas at Harvard and many others, are saying that immigration doesn't really help the economy, not significantly. What you have to look at is whether it increases the per capita income of the current population, and most studies indicate that it does not. It does not. And our own economic studies dating back to the Macdonald royal commission, the Economic Council report, and Health and Welfare did an extensive study, significantly pointed out that immigration has very little impact on the economy.
The labour force may be a different thing. But again, if you're bringing in a lot of foreign labour, you are inhibiting the chances of people who are already here from getting training so they can get into the trades they want to get into. That should be a study. There isn't, in my view, a national labour force policy that makes sense.
You have high unemployment in the Maritimes. You have employers in Calgary who want 60,000 workers and can't get them. I don't know how you resolve that, but I think it's unwise to assume that you should keep doing this for labour force reasons.
The House of Lords in England did a study in 2008 and concluded that the British bringing in 190,000 immigrants each year was ridiculous. They didn't need immigrants for the economy, they were not helping the labour force, and they certainly don't help the aging. Yet Mr. Kenney, who was here this morning, will argue that we need immigrants for economic development, we need immigrants for labour force enhancement, and we need immigrants because of the aging of our labour force. There aren't economists who buy into that. Most countries don't buy into that.
I think we need a fundamental reform of the system. Initially, the backlog is the first thing you have to tackle, and it's a tough one. But I think Richard has given some excellent ideas. My own view is that until you get the backlog off your back, you'll not be able to run a proper immigration program.
On the provincial nomination program, it's working reasonably well, but the danger there is that these people coming in do not have to meet any federal standards of education, skills, or occupations. That can be a problem if they start moving around.