Thank you very much.
As we talk about immigrants and poverty, I would like to start by acknowledging, as I think we always need to, that we're doing this work on land that is the traditional home of first peoples. The rest of us are here, continuing to live together and enjoy that land.
As you hear over and over, poverty doesn't affect everybody equally. I want to focus my comments on the fact that immigrants are in one of the demographics that most experiences poverty, particularly more newly arrived immigrants and immigrants with refugee or refugee-like backgrounds.
I'm going to try to make a couple of comments about two groups of immigrants: first, those who are highly skilled and educated; and secondly, those who, like refugees, often come with a background that does not prepared them very well for life in Canada.
Overall, immigrants are brave, talented people. They bring tremendous social and financial assets with them when they come to Canada. For their story in Canada to be one of poverty is both immoral and foolish on the part of Canada.
They want a chance to use their assets and achieve for themselves. They don't want to spend their lives in extended dependence on public services and finances. But if that's going to happen, Canada needs to understand the importance of investing at the upstream end of their lives so they can avoid poverty and, more than that, can start making significant contributions to the overall economic strength of the nation that will really benefit all of us, not just themselves.
For a number of years, research has consistently shown that immigrants are taking a longer time to achieve economic equivalence to Canadians compared to what was happening one, two, or three decades ago. A couple of very sensible, basic things would make a huge difference to all immigrants.
Immigrants often have families and there are a lot of children in those families. Today, you've already heard about the idea of an expanded or a richer child tax benefit. This is a very effective way to get more income into people's hands.
The other point is that the lack of a national housing strategy to ensure adequate, affordable, and appropriate housing for people with low incomes is especially serious for immigrants. Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers did some research on this three years ago. We found that over 70% of the sample of 200 families we looked at were paying more than 30% of their monthly income for rent, and 30% is considered to be the maximum that should be spent. Over 30% of the families were spending more than 50% of their monthly income on rent, and in that sample of 200 families here in Edmonton, the monthly incomes involved were about $1,500.
When you're spending more than 50% of $1,500 you don't have much left for the rest of your life. This whole issue of housing is one that's particularly serious for immigrants.
Brand new Statistics Canada information that's a few weeks old shows that there have been dramatic job losses for recent immigrants, and not having employment is a sure path to poverty. In Alberta, there was a 2.4% reduction in employment in the year from October 2008 to October 2009 for the population overall. For immigrants, it was 21.2%.
One out of five immigrants lost a job in the last year in Alberta. If that doesn't increase the probability of poverty being part of what characterizes their lives, I don't know what does. Poverty nurtures poverty. You know about so many of these domino stories where the beginning of a life in poverty leads on and on. We see so many immigrant families living in overcrowded conditions in basement suites. The children aren't eating well because there's no place to prepare and store food, so they're unhealthy and they're missing school. As they miss school, they fall behind academically. They get discouraged. They drop out of school. They end up on the street. You can take that story on and on.
I've always been chilled by a story one of the staff shared with me while I was working at the Mennonite Centre for Newcomers. It was about a mother from Africa who came here with two children. They were escaping a war. The children were excited to be in Canada and looking forward to futures as doctors and engineers. After a couple of years of living in poverty, this mother said to the staff person that it would have been better if they had stayed home. At least there, she said, she could see the war that they were caught up in. She said Canada was in an invisible war, but it was just as dangerous for her and her children. That's what we're facing.
The first point I want to make is that poverty results from wasting the talents and energy of highly skilled immigrants, from undervaluing the education and experience they have from outside Canada. There have been some recent announcements in the last few days about measures that might make a small impact, but these measures relate to a few licensed professions. This is a large, complex issue that involves a significant number of immigrants. The great majority are from the skilled class, so it's not just a few licensed professions where this undervaluing happens.
We know from research that employers place just about zero value on work experience outside Canada, so people are discounted without even having their credentials properly looked at. We have to pay attention to these things. If you get trapped in a low-paying job for a few years, the chances of ever getting back into the fields that you're truly qualified for become very small.
We have to focus our strategies on employers. It's not a matter of technical recognition. It's a matter of people being able to get the jobs that they're truly qualified for, that they've invested in, and that they want to do. That's what we need to be doing for people so that they can contribute.
These strategies need to provide post-secondary institutions and NGOs with the flexibility to develop innovative programs that prepare immigrants for the labour market. Too often, publicly funded programs have mere employment as the expected outcome. That's not the point. It's the good and proper jobs that have a long-term positive impact. The temporary foreign worker program and its relation to unskilled jobs is another issue that has created poverty problems.
The second item I wanted to address is refugees. More and more, the refugees who come to Canada are coming with virtually no education and no job skills that are relevant to the Canadian labour market. It's tough for them to get out of poverty. They also have higher levels of mental illness because of long periods of time in dangerous war situations. When you're struggling with mental illness, you can't concentrate on education or holding a job.
So we need to fund a spectrum of specialized mental health services for refugees. This will require training specialists for therapy and will support community-based activity so that we can address these issues early on.
In addition, the living allowance provided for government-assisted refugees for their first year in Canada is based on welfare rates in provinces, which are far below what people need to live with dignity. This allowance needs to be based on the market basket measure of poverty, so that it pays attention to actual costs of living. Even little issues like immigration fees or the required repayment of transportation loans as a debt burden upon arrival in Canada should be addressed so that people have a chance to move out of poverty.
None of these are very expensive suggestions, but I guarantee you that they are smart investments that let immigrants, as they come to this country, move quickly to contribute to Canada in positive ways. We'll all benefit from that in the years to come.
Thanks for your interest and your work on this challenging and important issue.