Human Resources Committee on March 27th, 2007

[Marie Lemay]

We made 17 recommendations. I couldn't list them all, but I'd like to give you the references later.

As I said earlier, people need information as soon as possible, to be in a position to make informed decisions and have realistic expectations upon arrival.

Now, there are other aspects as well. For instance, people should be able to start the process while they are waiting to immigrate here but while they are still at home. In fact, it is often easier to obtain documents on site than it would be once people are in Canada. They could start by requesting a licence, which is now available for several other professions. There are a number of things which can be done.

One of the things that we set up which is really interesting is what we call an interim licence. There are many names for that. There was a time when engineers would arrive in Canada and meet with a representative from a professional body to inform this body that they had studied in a given place and wanted to have their licence.

We could assess people's education, but they had to have practised in Canada for one year or an equivalent amount of time. It is very important because of codes, standards, etc. So, people were told they had to work for one year. When they went to see employers, the employers would say that they did not have any jobs for these engineers. Essentially, employers were saying that they were unable to assess a person's skills, education and training facility.

So, we created a temporary permit to inform employers that the person had met all criteria except for the one-year work experience. It's very useful for employers, because they then know that candidates only have to work for one year to obtain their degree. At the moment, I think 8 out of 12 provinces and territories are using the system, and we hope all of the other provinces will follow.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Do you know if there are other professional associations that operate in this way?

[Marie Lemay]

I'm not sure.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

You're not sure. All right, thank you.

I would quickly like to ask the members of your association a question—

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's all the time we have. We'll have to get you in the second round.

Mr. Lake, you have five minutes, please.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Chair, I want to start with Ms. Lemay, if I could.

The riding I represent is a riding that has about 30% visible minorities. Many people from different parts of the world have moved there. One of the frustrations I definitely hear, time and time again, is from people who are trained in various professions--and engineering is one of them, specifically--who have moved their families halfway around the world because they were told, back where they came from, that Canada was a great opportunity and that if they moved here they could get a job as an engineer pretty much right away. Then they get here and realize that they have a lot to do.

So it's interesting listening to what you're doing to address the issue in those other countries you identified. I guess the way you worded it is that you need to start thinking about it before they come here. I'd like you to talk a little bit more to that. I know that you touched on it a little bit.

A large part of the population in my riding is Indo-Canadian. Specifically, for those people, what are you doing to inform people and let them know what to expect when they're still back in India, before they come here?

[Marie Lemay]

One of our challenges is that we don't have access to these people, and that's why changing the selection process and including adaptability selection and having points for that is an incentive to get people to then come to the profession and ask the questions. Then we can give them information, and we can get the accurate information out.

Right now, we don't have that channel, so the only thing we can do is work with the government to try to have access, get the word out, and get the immigration agencies to send them to us so we can get that information. That's why the referral agency, we think, can fill a gap there in trying to do that. That's one of our biggest challenges.

We used to be in the selection process. The last year we did that was in 2001. We had access to 25,000 immigrants who said they wanted to be engineers. The process had to be modified. We had to better it. It had to have a lot of changes. We did not need to throw the whole thing out at the time, because immigration had gone up so much. From 1995 to 2000 there had been a real peaking. The adjustments needed in the system at that time are all in place right now, but we don't have that contact anymore. Where we had 25,000 coming to us in 2001, we have 500 coming to us now, because they don't have any reason to come to us, so we can't give them that information.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

You also talked about the challenge that's been talked about many times. Mobility is a challenge across the country. But one of the challenges that we seem to hear about time and time again is this issue of credentials within the country, from one area to another.

What is your organization doing to ensure that there's some level of compatibility, say, between the qualifications in Alberta, where I come from, and Ontario or the Maritimes or other parts of the country?

[Marie Lemay]

The first part of the qualification being the education, we do that for all the universities. So that's a given. The second part is the experience and the exams. Our role is to bring the provinces together and try to uniform the processes as much as we can, and we've done that.

As I was saying earlier, the time now to move from one province to the other...with the inter-association mobility agreement that we have, you can get a permit within five days 99% of the time. I think it's within two days 50% of the time. So those processes are now, I'd say, virtually the same. Because they're all enacted in the provinces, maybe they would be written a little differently, but in practice they are the same. We know that we have to compete with the outside world. We're talking about international mobility. In Canada we have to make sure that engineers can move from one end to the other. We've been working on that.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I have a last question.

My daughter is seven years old, and she likes it when I mention her in the House or in committee. But she's a very logical, structural thinker. I often say to her that she should be an engineer. What would you say to a girl like that, as she gets older, to encourage her? It can be pretty intimidating if there's only 20% in the....

[Marie Lemay]

I have a 16-year-old, and I've been trying very hard to get her into engineering. Young girls want to change the world. They want to have an impact. They want to make a difference. The challenge right now is that we haven't been able to make them understand that the place to go is engineering because that's where you can make a difference. That's what will actually make you do and change things. So if she wants to solve problems and she's creative and she wants to make a difference, that's the place to be.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Lake.

Thank you, Ms. Lemay.

We're going to move to our second round, five minutes as well. Mr. Savage, please.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for coming out today.

I'd like to start with Ms. Moore and Mr. McKeown. The CNIB is a great organization. I had the opportunity to do some volunteer work, a little bit, with the CNIB years ago when they were raising $30-some million for a talking library across Canada. Don MacVicar, who is a great former Scotiabanker, was heading the effort in Nova Scotia, and I worked with him that little bit, and I got to meet the CNIB people in Nova Scotia, who were doing great work.

First of all, your brief indicates that the job seekers with vision loss you're talking about are approximately 20% university graduates. Are you talking about people with vision loss as a whole, or specifically the people who are a subset of that group?

[Cathy Moore]

Of that age group, of the 18-to-64 age group, 20% of them are post-secondary graduates, college or university, compared with 23% in the regular population. That's why we're saying that educational attainment is nearing the norm, but that labour market attachment, if I can use that jargon, is nowhere near. We're closer to 49% of people who are looking for work and are qualified to work being unemployed, and 49% is a pretty high rate.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I agree with that. The fact that 20% have graduated from university, compared to 23%, is a number I find surprising, considering the extra challenge that it would be for somebody with vision loss to attain post-secondary education. So that's a pretty impressive number.

[Cathy Moore]

It's an impressive number, but understand that it's a low-incident disability, so that 20% may represent under 1,000 actual people, if you follow me.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I'd like you to talk a bit about the challenges of somebody with vision loss going to university, maybe somebody who's blind as opposed to somebody with partial vision loss, the challenges of actually attaining a post-secondary education degree.

[Cathy Moore]

The challenge is always access to print. Almost everything else is relatively easily surmountable--how to find your classroom, etc. There's mobility training for that. But the challenge always is timely access to the print material, particularly if a professor is changed; they're doing course packs now rather than textbooks and that sort of thing. There are educational resource companies across the country who are dedicated to producing those resources, but it's always a challenge. We inevitably have people who can't read regular print waiting for their alternate format, receiving it at the end of October, after mid-terms, so they've had no chance to begin to actually study the material that everybody else has been reading since September 1.

So that's one of the major challenges and obstacles. Also, you're dealing with young people. In August they change their mind and they change their major. Well, everybody else gets to do that, but that sets a whole sequence of complications in terms of accommodating that person.

[Bill McKeown]

One of the other factors is the lack of equipment. Students need Braille notetakers, closed-circuit television systems, devices to digitally record materials, and things like that. That's another added expense for the disabled student that other students don't have.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Okay, thank you.

Ms. Lemay, the engineers in Nova Scotia have a very good professional engineers' organization, APENS, which has done a lot of work, and we're ahead of the curve on immigration. If Canada has been 10 years behind the curve, Atlantic Canada is probably 20 years behind the curve, and we're finally at the point now where everybody's united to try to improve that. But I think engineers were out in front in that.

My question, though, is how well are the engineers working, not with government or other engineers, but other professional groups--I'm thinking perhaps technologists and technicians, for example, but other professional groups--in making sure we have a united approach to immigration?

[Marie Lemay]

Thank you for that question, because I wanted to speak on the technologist portion. But you should be proud of APENS. It has won an award from an immigrant service agency, and this was one of the first times that a regulatory body was recognized by the Metropolitan Immigrant Settlement Association as being a good partner, so you should be proud of them.

In terms of working with others, one of the things I wanted to say earlier--and I thank you for that question--is that we're also doing the labour market study with the technologists, because what's really important when you do the evaluation and the accreditation and the assessment of the competence of people coming is this. If they are missing a few courses, they may decide, if they're missing a little bit too much, that they fit a technologist's job better. We have to link with the technology so we can do that referral and say, okay, if it's not engineering it's more a technologist's degree, so we do work with them quite closely.

A few years back, we also created a group called the Canadian Network of National Associations of Regulators. It's trying to get all the regulators at the national level together to address issues. We've shown what we've done, hoping it would be a model, and the nurses have started something too. The doctors are doing it a little differently.

So we are trying to connect with the other professions to see if we can move this, all together.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you. That's all the time we have.

We're now going to move to the Bloc and Madame Bonsant. You have five minutes.

Okay, Monsieur Lessard.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

My question is for the representative from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. From your brief we see that you have high expectations when it comes to government job access measures. Also, you say that you have access to other manpower, like new immigrants, aboriginal people, people with disabilities and seniors. That covered almost everyone.

My question is this: you are part of an association and you do have a role to play in terms of giving your members some direction. What do you do to promote better integration for these groups?

[Corinne Pohlmann]

We are looking at that. We believe there is no role for government; it needs to be industry-driven. Industry itself has to look at ways to better integrate. So we have worked with immigration settlement agencies in various provinces across the country, we have worked with organizations that work with people with disabilities, and we try to work with them to find ways to match some of our members with the people they're bringing in through those systems.

At the national level it's more difficult for us to do, so we do a lot of that work more regionally. For example, prior to my role here in Ottawa, I was in Alberta for five and a half years as the provincial director for CFIB and I did lots of work with some of the groups like EmployAbilities out of Edmonton. I would work with them and talk with them, and we would try to find ways to get more information to employers to help them understand what they need to do to integrate people into their workplace.

What we really try to push--and when we look at these groups, many of them are doing great work helping aboriginals, for example, and people with handicaps and new immigrants get the skills they need to get the job. But what happens too often is that these people now have the skills, but when they move into a workplace, sometimes that workplace doesn't know how to integrate that person very well and we lose out helping that business understand what it needs to do to help make that person feel welcome.

So a lot of the work we do is to try to find ways to broaden these programs to also help employers understand how to educate other employees as well as themselves to better integrate that person into that particular workplace. Some of the work I did in Alberta was also with aboriginal groups in trying to look at the ways they could extend their programs to at least provide information to employers as to what they may need to understand to be more culturally sensitive to that particular employee and make sure they stay there for more than three months. Too often people feel alienated when they come into a company because they may feel different, and they end up leaving after three to six months. Having that support network with employers for at least a few months, I think, goes a long way in helping that person eventually integrate into a workforce.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

It also has a great deal to do with training, education and the rest. You say so in your document as well. You are also expecting financial support from the government for that. You refer to tax credits, etc. Take, for instance, the Quebec program for companies that have more than 50 employees; they have to set aside 1% of their sales figures for training purposes.

Do you think that would be feasible in the other provinces? Is that something you would support? Generally, people turn to government. Companies may have great intentions, but we see few of them implemented. Would this be workable elsewhere?