You're going to have to allow me to step back a little bit to explain the context for the initiative.
We have heard musings over the last few months that many immigrants were faced with significant credentials costs when passing their exams. That's particularly true in the medical professions. Here, I'm not talking about physicians but about the medical professions in general. We've been asked to examine whether or not this was a real barrier. We know that language is a barrier. We know that credentialing is a barrier. We know that lack of experience is a barrier. But the question we were asked was, are financial barriers real barriers for individuals coming from outside?
What we had essentially heard is that when immigrants come here from outside the country, they don't have a credit history and literally cannot access our credit system as a result. It's the same for Canadians who have studied abroad. They are coming back and have this big gap, and the chartered banks in Canada are reluctant to lend money to people who don't have a credit history. So we've observed that.
We've looked at the literature out there on whether or not this is a real problem, because we want to do it based on evidence. There is not a lot of information, aside from survey data, telling us that 50%, say, face financial concerns and 30% cannot get credit when they try to get it. That information was pretty thin.
So instead of establishing, what I would call, costly new programs that sometimes don't work, the department over the years has learned to proceed carefully, step by step. What we have is an initiative whereby we're going to spend approximately $6 million per year over the next three years, working in partnership with the communities and the agents on various projects. We're going to have up to 10 project sites and are going to try to encourage the communities to assemble the key partnerships that are needed to provide access to credit.
We did a survey, or a scan, if you will, of what's going on in the country, and there are a few initiatives currently on the ground. They're great initiatives and we're going to try to solicit proposals on what we can do to support them. Essentially we're going to do an institutional test of sorts to find out the best model, the lessons learned, and figure out if there is a problem and what can be fixed, and how best we can provide support and whether there is a role for government in the long-term in doing this work.