Human Resources Committee on Nov. 3rd, 2011

[Cathy Giblin]

No, there is no fee for the assessment. If individuals are required to go on and complete additional education following the assessment, then yes, they would be charged for tuition fees, books, etc.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you.

We'll move to Mr. Daniel for the final five minutes.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'm just going to take you on a slightly different tack, just to assess how much this process and system is bleeding.

What I mean by that is that I have people coming to my office and talking to me about recruiting Canadians to go to China and other places, because of their language skills, etc., and I'm wondering whether you track that or whether you actually look at that in any way—for example, the nurses coming in, going through this bridging process, and then going and working in the U.S. instead of working here, since they pay a lot more for nursing.

That's for either or both of you.

[Cathy Giblin]

I can speak to that a little bit.

In short, no, we're not tracking that sort of thing. We know anecdotally about situations like the ones you described, but we've not had the need, the time, or the resources required to track individuals for the long term as they enter our systems and then move within them.

[Suzanne Gordon]

We do track employment outcomes for up to a year after a participant has graduated from a bridging program. From the outcomes I have seen, I have not seen any U.S. employers on the lists. I haven't seen all of the outcomes and all of the employers, but it hasn't been brought to my attention.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Okay.

Could you talk a little bit more about your mentoring program? Again, from experience, I think mentoring seems to have a huge payout in getting people into work situations. I'm a first-generation Canadian, and the climate is such that the question is always asked, “Where's your Canadian experience?” Of course, you can't get experience without getting a job, and you can't get a job without experience, so you're locked in that kind of loop. I've heard that some of these mentoring programs actually are good at getting people into the workforce and getting them engaged.

[Suzanne Gordon]

Yes, they are. In the continuum that I handed out, one of the things we ask all of our bridging program service providers to do is to bring people directly into contact with employers. They might choose to do that through mentoring.

One initiative whose start-up we have funded and continue to fund is the mentoring partnership with the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, which is what you're probably thinking about. We also have one in London, Ontario, and we have other programs that are for mentorship in regulated occupations. In nursing, for example, it takes the form of a preceptorship. These programs do have a strong impact.

Right here in Ottawa, there's a very strong organization, Hire Immigrants Ottawa. They do a networking type of mentorship. Honestly, I wouldn't have believed that this works: You go and have coffee and stand in a corner. If you're IT, you go over to that corner. If I'm government, I stand in this corner. People are trained in how to interact. Jobs and matches are made. They've managed to place over 1,000 immigrant professionals using that type of system in the past four or five years. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen the results and been to an event myself.

It's that coming into contact and getting people to share that counts--“Maybe you should go talk to my friend so-and-so”. Building that network of people and support is very important. Mentorship programs do it in a very structured, organized way.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Ms. Giblin, do you have any comments?

[Cathy Giblin]

I have nothing comparable to offer that's happening in Alberta, although I would have to say that the kind of structure Ms. Gordon is describing is absolutely essential.

I think there's a lot of willingness to offer those sorts of services and to be involved. People ask, “Where do I go? How do I get started? I'm one employer. I'm one immigrant-serving agency. How do we participate?” It's bringing all of those willing participants together under that kind of structure that I think is absolutely essential.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

On another question, a number of the other associations have a pan-Canadian ability. In other words, they've actually worked with the associations in each of the provinces so that if you are qualified or have reached a particular standard in Ontario and then move to Alberta, where there are tons of jobs, it's a straightforward transfer. There are no barriers to your performing in your profession.

We've also heard that from a nursing point of view and from service people. Their wives transfer with them, from Nova Scotia to Ontario, and the wives can't work in nursing, because it's not connected in any way.

Are there any comments on what could be done to accelerate that sort of pan-Canadian situation?

[Suzanne Gordon]

I think the agreement on internal trade will certainly accelerate that pretty quickly. That's one aspect of it, clearly.

I think encouraging the regulatory bodies and giving them an opportunity to come together, discuss, share, and identify the tools and processes they would agree to use would be helpful.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you. Your time is up. Your testimony has been quite interesting.

I have something to put before the committee. We're going to suspend for about five to eight minutes for the next witness.

We have one witness from the Government of Manitoba. The suggestion is that the witness from Manitoba could present, and if there is consent from the committee, we could have the two of you remain at the table. Then the questions could be posed to any of the three of you, depending on your time constraints.

First, do you have any difficulty remaining for a further period of one hour?

[Suzanne Gordon]

I'm fine with that.

[Cathy Giblin]

You're keeping me out of the mall, but I'm fine with that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

That might be advantageous to some extent.

[Cathy Giblin]

It's probably advisable if I stay with you, actually.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

I'll just ask the members of the committee if they have any objection to proceeding in that way.

If that is agreeable, we will suspend for about five to eight minutes and then we'll recommence.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

I will call the meeting to order.

I know the committee has been doing very well so far in terms of cooperation. I wonder if I can ask the committee's indulgence for one further point. If we change from our regular rounds of five minutes to rounds of seven minutes each, and we went one complete round, we would be finishing here near 5:30 and, of course, many have to leave at 5:30.

So would the committee be agreeable to deviating from our regular practice to seven-minute rounds? Everybody would get one round and then we'd be done.

I see agreement. We won't hesitate too much longer.

I might mention that you will have five to seven minutes to present. If you go a little longer, we'll be okay with that and then there will be rounds of seven minutes of questioning from each of the parties.

We'll start with you, Ms. Munoz. Go ahead, please.

[Ximena Munoz, Commissioner, Office of the Manitoba Fairness Commissioner, Department of Labour and Immigration, Government of Manitoba]

Thank you very much, and thank you for the opportunity.

Practical recommendations to further shorten FQR processes are really important to me. A shortened process certainly is important.

I am Ximena Munoz, and I am the Manitoba Fairness Commissioner. That's a very new position. I've been in that job for only two years. There are only three commissioners in the country--one in Ontario, one in Quebec, and one in Manitoba. My job is to implement the new act, which came into effect in 2009.

Today, I would like to talk to you about the work of the self-regulated bodies.

Immigration is key for Manitoba. We need the people. We are working very hard to attract people. We need them to come in and be able to integrate into the labour market in their professions, and it's taking too long. I was at a focus group the other day where immigrants were congratulating each other because for somebody it had taken only four years to get recognized as accountant. Four years is a long time.

Manitoba has been very committed to this issue since 2003. The approach we took in Manitoba was to look at the need for systemic change. So it wasn't just preparing immigrants; it was looking at what we're doing and how we're doing it and asking ourselves if that was the right way and the best way to do it. The process was led by the provincial government, and one of the main things that came out of it was the recognition and acceptance that this issue was not any one body's responsibility. Really, there are many stakeholders involved in this, and it really will take all of us to find a solution.

In 2009 the Fair Registration Practices in Regulated Professions Act was proclaimed. The act requires that regulatory bodies--and Manitoba has 31 of them--have assessment and registration processes that are fair, transparent, objective, and impartial, and that they appoint a commissioner--and that's me--and also commit to supporting immigrants and to supporting regulators to come up with better practices.

It also requires that the regulators report to me on applicants and their numbers, which is something they haven't had to do to date. So I get to review the assessment processes. I get to sit down with them and go over what they do, what they ask people to have, how they assess them, and what exam or practicum and so on is used. We start in many cases from what the regulator is doing, even pre-migration, in terms of giving people information. We see our process ending when people get to work in their profession. So it isn't just about getting the recognition but actually getting a recognized licence and practising in their profession.

The focus of our work is not the professional standards of each profession but rather how regulators assess people against those standards. That's where we think a lot of the issues are, and I think we've been proven pretty right. They're not being asked to lower their standards and let immigrants in through the back door. They're being asked to make sure that the way in which they assess them is fair.

We take a very collaborative approach to that work. We were second in the country; Ontario was ahead of us, and is always a year or so ahead of us. Actually, the woman sitting next to me was the key drafter of that initial law in Ontario, and we benefited a lot from that, so she deserves a lot of credit.

The bridge that we decided to use in Manitoba was collaborative, collegial, and supportive. I started from the premise that there are no bad guys, there are just people trying to do a job and there may be things they don't know how to do very well. You may be a very good architect, but that doesn't mean you're a good assessor or a good evaluator. So we started from that perspective.

We've also been able to provide some financial support. It isn't only about looking at what they're doing, how they're doing it, and how they could do it better, but what is it they have to do, how do they are going about doing it, and who is helping them with the funding.

My office has taken that on, and as a result I think we have some really good things. We have much better information for immigrants, so people can access information even before they come here. There are better websites. We've done a lot of work in terms of plain language and things like that. We've done a lot of capacity development activities. We've done training on appeals, which is required by the law. They must have appeal processes and, believe me, many of them don't. We've done managing cultural diversity, and we've done written reasons.

We've also engaged regulators from outside of Manitoba to share what they do. We just had a fantastic presentation by the med labs, the medical laboratory society nationally. Different bodies have come in to share with us. The lawyers did a session on written reasons, and the engineers did a session on reconsideration of decisions, etc.

They are required, for the first time, to provide us with information on how many people are applying, and how many are successful and how many are not. We are also tracking all the steps in the process, for each of them. We don't just want to find out that ten applied and only one got recognized, but where the nine who didn't get recognized failed and where the problems are.

We think that is really going to help us—

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Excuse me, Ms. Munoz, but could put your microphone down a little bit? It's causing a bit of a squeal.

[Ximena Munoz]

Okay, thank you.

So we are very happy about that. Regulators started collecting the data in January of 2011, and they're going to provide us with the first set of data in March 2012.

In order for them to do that, we did a lot of work with them. We also provided financial support to make sure they had the databases and systems that allow them to actually gather this information. In Manitoba, by the way, over 60% of the regulatory bodies have a staff of three people or fewer, so they are small.

The other thing we have done with them is something that we're calling professional practice seminars. One of the challenges that immigrants are facing—and I'm sure you've heard a lot about that by now—is knowing and understanding the culture of the profession in Canada and finding places where they can go to find that out, particularly in the health professions where you cannot set foot in a practice until you are recognized.

Where do people learn that? They are assessed on that, so my call was why don't we teach people this? When you're teaching them, they'll know it, rather than just testing them.

Professional practice seminars are something we have worked on with them. Immigrants will have access to them. There are seven workshops dealing with the culture in the workplace where you work, how much you get paid, management styles, co-workers, jurisprudence, safety, etc.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

We need you to wrap up, if you could.

[Ximena Munoz]

I will, but I have to get to my point.

This has been challenging for regulators. Right now they are subject to a lot of demands from various parts. Labour mobility is a big issue for them. The pan-Canadian framework is something else in their field.

At least the Manitoba numbers are increasing; they're seeing more people applying. Many feel they just don't have the expertise to really deal with this effectively. They really have limited resources and structures.

I think there are some other issues as well. I'll be very gentle, but I think we still have an ethnocentric view that if it's Canadian, it's much better. Nobody can come close to what we have in Canada. I think that's true in many instances, but it's not true in everything, and it's not allowing us to see the other--

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

I have to interrupt you there. You might be able to complete this in your answers. There will be seven-minute rounds.