Thank you.
Bonjour. Good morning.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your kind invitation, and to you, Mr. Truelove, for facilitating our first visit to your committee.
Our appearance here is due to pure serendipity: a chance encounter in a parliamentary corridor with the member for Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, a riding with which I have a long association through its former inmate, the Honourable David Kilgour.
My name is Anu Bose. I am the executive director of the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of Canada. With me is my colleague Mirjana Pobric. I will speak, and Ms. Pobric will be here to answer any questions you might have for us. We are both able to speak from personal experience, having been casualties of the foreign credentials and lack of Canadian experience syndrome.
We are here to present to you the findings of our project “Creating Employment Opportunities for Immigrant Women in Canada”. This one-year project, which ends on March 31, 2007, was carried out with financial assistance from Status of Women Canada.
At the very outset we wish to state that the sample on which the findings are based is not scientific. The results are based on a series of interviews with employers, small, medium and large, public and private, and face-to-face meetings between the employers and immigrant women in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.
What do we mean by employability in the immigrant's context? Education and training are sure tickets for entry into Canada. Seventy per cent of all adult immigrants to Ontario--the province of choice for newcomers--arrive with post-secondary credentials. Federal immigration policy, contends the Globe and Mail editorial from December 19 last year, is based more on long-term adaptability than a simple match to labour market needs. Once they're landed, it is in Canada's interest to ensure that their credentials and their competencies are fairly assessed and they are able to find employment commensurate with their skills and qualifications.
NOIVMWC has testimonies from newcomer women to show that this cohort of immigrant women and men are better qualified than ever before, yet they are worse off economically than any previous less-educated cohorts. Employability for us immigrants has come to mean being consigned to “McJobs”--dead-end, low-waged, and unskilled work--or short-term contract work with little or no benefits in a flexible labour market. Underemployment is the immigrant's curse, and we are the victims of skill erosion and what Professor Jeffrey Reitz has referred to as brain waste.
Immigrant or new Canadian status has become a liability when trying to enter the Canadian workforce. What prevents us immigrants from being employable? NOIVMWC found that there are a number of reasons that make immigrants unemployable. Some are systemic, and some are based on individual prejudice and ignorance.
There is the vexatious question of foreign credentials, which I think has been belaboured to death. We regret the federal government's recent announcements that the long-promised agency has now been downgraded to a pathfinding referral service that small agencies are doing with limited resources. We do not see any concerted efforts to create alternative methods of assessing immigrants' competencies and work experience in their countries of origin or third countries.
There is discrimination, not often subtle, against immigrants because they have foreign-sounding names or because they look, talk, or dress differently from other Canadians. Too many immigrant men and women have been discouraged from applying after having been ignored by the selection process.
There is a marked tendency in Canadian HR circles to be more concerned with fit between a person and an organization or a department. This allows some highly subjective criteria to be used when assessing a person, which would not be the case if there was more emphasis on the objective criteria of ability, competence, and achievement. Therefore, there is a predisposition to hire people who are either from their own networks or come from the same demographic groupings.
Speaking of networks, immigrants, even well-educated and experienced middle-class ones, find their intellectual and social capital is not portable.
There is also a question of language barriers. Canada requires knowledge of one or other of the two official languages for entry. On arrival, newcomers become too preoccupied with their survival to be able to acquire new language skills or upgrade qualifications, leaving little of the money that they bring in to go into the expensive requalification and upgrading battle.
Our brief, which we have distributed, is a very simple one. We have for you a list of recommendations made by employers and immigrant women sitting at the same table in different cities. We hope you will take time to read them. The full report is available on our website, and we have some here for you also.
All immigrant and visible minority women and men want is a level playing field, or at least the opportunity to learn to swim in the same pool as other Canadians.
Merci. Thank you for your indulgence.