Thank you very much. I will be brief.
Good afternoon, everyone. I am very pleased to appear before you once again.
I was a little unsure of what to tell you since I was here a few months ago delivering a lot of data and information about physiotherapy's efforts to integrate foreign-trained and -skilled physiotherapy workers. I thought I'd take a slightly different tack this time and talk to you about our perception of new discussions around policy targeting skilled workers—skilled immigrants who can actually integrate immediately into the workforce.
One of the realities is that we in Canada are among the most highly trained physiotherapists in the world. There are only a few countries that can put physiotherapists directly into practise here in Canada—Ireland, the U.K, Australia, and New Zealand. Not even our American counterparts could get licensed right away. That difference between those countries and the rest of the world is not about language or culture. It has more to do with the acceptance of interprofessional collaborative models of health care.
Having foreign-trained physiotherapists coming to Canada from other countries requires big investments in evaluation, education, and language training. The physiotherapy community has made these investments over the last several years. We now have three integration programs: one at the University of Toronto, one at the University of Alberta, and one at UBC. The last two came online in the last few weeks.
Despite this new capacity, it's still at least two years from arrival in Canada to licensure for physiotherapists. That's not good enough, and we are doing what we can to improve.
One solution may be graduated licensing, but I believe that trades one bureaucratic headache for another. How do you integrate the workforce quickly? We could look to Ireland as a source of skilled immigration. They have a tremendous surplus of physiotherapists right now, but that surplus is based more on their inability to pay than on population demand.
My concern would be that if physiotherapy were to target the U.K., Ireland, and Australia, inputs would not necessarily be permanent. The boom-bust cycle in Ireland has a high amplitude, and I would suspect that when the boom comes back, expatriates may be quite willing to leave Canada. We may be trading one problem for another by drawing on those resources.
Unlike engineering and other industries where skilled workers can come to Canada and the growth of the economy mirrors their immediate contribution, growth in the health sector mirrors the population and its ability to pay. The risks resulting from miscalculation of human resources demand in the health field are extremely high. The question we must ask is, will a skilled immigrant strategy that's right for our resource, manufacturing, and service sectors be the right one for our health sector? I don't have the answer today to that question, but it does give one pause.
Thank you, everyone. I promised to keep it brief. I would be happy to take questions—maybe some other time at the parliamentary restaurant.