Thank you very much.
I'd like to start by thanking the standing committee for its invitation to COSTI Immigrant Services to present our views and recommendations on a federal role in poverty reduction.
COSTI is a registered charity. We provide immigrant settlement integration services in the Greater Toronto Area. We are well known in the Greater Toronto Area and certainly well known by your member Maria Minna, who served as our president for a number of years before she went into politics. We've been around for about 57 years and we serve about 60,000 people annually.
Given our mission in immigrant settlement, I will focus my remarks on the growing prevalence of poverty among immigrants.
Immigration is important to Canada. It's essential in maintaining our population base and in feeding the growth of our labour market. Statistics Canada, reporting on the results of the 2006 census, notes that an increase in international immigration was responsible for the acceleration of Canada's growth rate over the last five years. Since 2001, 1.2 million immigrants have arrived in Canada. Roughly two-thirds of Canada's population growth now comes from net international migration.
Immigration is also vital to maintain the labour force. By the year 2011, Canada will depend on immigration for net labour force growth. The aging population and retirements will contribute to labour shortages, and Canada is now facing increased international competition for skilled workers from other industrialized countries. To give you an idea of the economic impact of immigration on a city like Toronto, in the five years between 2001 and 2006, Toronto's population grew by just under 1%. If you removed immigration from this calculation, the population of Toronto would actually have dropped by 10%. Consider the implications to the city's economy of such a scenario.
Here's the challenge: in 1981, a principal applicant in the skilled worker class coming to Canada earned approximately $7,000 more than the Canadian average just one year after arriving here; in the year 2000, he was earning $4,000 less.
Meaningful economic engagement is the most significant challenge facing immigrants. Recent immigrants are doing worse economically than previous cohorts, despite higher education levels. Among recent immigrants--that is, those who have arrived in the five years between 2001 and 2006--64% have a post-secondary certificate, diploma, or degree, compared to 49% of Canadian-born adults, but 60% of these immigrants are not working in jobs for which they trained and were educated. The main common reasons for this underemployment or unemployment are lack of Canadian work experience, lack of recognition of foreign credentials, poor language skills, and other obstacles such as racism and discriminatory practices.
The impact of these obstacles to meaningful employment is that poverty rates for immigrants are the highest among all disadvantaged groups. In Toronto about one person in four lives in poverty, but for recent immigrants, poverty rates are 46%. Female lone parents and aboriginal people have poverty levels of 37%, and racialized groups have rates of 33%. Toronto has turned into an economically segregated city, with high levels of poverty in the suburbs and pockets of wealth in the downtown core. These poorer communities are now distinguishing themselves as primarily immigrant and racialized.
Here are my recommendations.
On average, immigrants come with over 13 years of education that has been provided by another country. It behooves Canada to invest in these newcomers by leveraging that education to Canada's benefit. So our first recommendation is that the Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement, which is due to expire next year, should be renewed at current levels of funding.
This agreement has resulted in new funding for a number of effective interventions for the benefit of immigrants. For example, in our experience at COSTI, enhanced language training programs that combine language training specific to occupations with job search are showing that 78% of graduates find work in their fields within three months of graduation. Other programs that this agreement has funded are higher levels of training in the linked programs.
My second recommendation is this. Research shows that the longer an immigrant takes to gain employment in his or her field, the less likely it is that this individual will work in his or her occupation. To its credit, the federal government has initiated programs overseas to give people a head start in the settlement process, but these are small and voluntary programs. We recommend that all immigrants applying through the federal skilled worker program be provided with labour market information sessions and employment preparation counsel in their country of origin prior to departure.
Lastly, the federal government needs to set specific poverty reduction targets that will benefit immigrants and all Canadians, as Ontario has done recently. Such a strategy should include amending the employment insurance qualifying criteria to allow more of the unemployed to receive benefits, setting a national housing strategy that sets clear targets, increasing the availability of affordable housing stock, and investing in child care and early learning. The cost of child care continues to be a disincentive to work, especially if several children require care.
I know my time is up, so I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much for your kind consideration of our brief.