Human Resources Committee on Oct. 18th, 2011

[Rob Walsh]

That might be the sort of information that Immigration can provide to immigrants to assist them in finding the place where they most likely would find employment in their professional field. Whether they do that or not, I'm not sure.

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

It wasn't the job market I was talking about. I was talking about the qualification recognition.

[Rob Walsh]

It may be that Immigration is able to provide that information to immigrants—where their qualifications most closely match the qualification requirements of a province so there would be less of an impairment to their practising their profession in that jurisdiction.

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

So that suggests that between provinces the standards are not the same.

[Rob Walsh]

Historically, they've not been the same, and the degree of disparity between them varies from one profession to the next. Hence, you have this program that the federal government has launched to deal with it. But yes, that's a fair comment.

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

Would there be some merit in taking this whole process to the federal level, as compared with the provincial level, so that there is some consistency between the provinces?

[Rob Walsh]

That same sort of argument is being made now by people who believe there should be a federal stock exchange. There is always a school of thought when difficulties arise between provinces in any given field that counsels avoiding all that and establishing one regulating authority at a federal level. That has a certain appeal for its simplicity, but the fact is that the provinces are pretty proud of their jurisdictions. They're pretty jealous of keeping their jurisdictions, and they're not about to hand it over to the federal level for the sake of convenience.

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

I think you're suggesting that the federal level would make it easier. I'm not suggesting that at all. I'm suggesting that there should be some consistency across the country.

[Rob Walsh]

Yes, it would be great if we could just see across the country and everybody would know they had one regulator and it wouldn't be a problem. Ideally, theoretically, that's a solution in this field, no question. But in reality, it's not going to happen.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Your time is pretty much up.

I found it interesting listening to you. You said the provinces have jurisdiction, but the provinces delegate some of that authority to various professional agencies and associations, which number in the hundreds. So when you say that the federal government could take action with respect to facilitating the process, it is a fairly significant process. Mr. Cuzner said they can use moral suasion, but in addition to that, there can be some funding enhancements that would persuade the various levels or jurisdictions to try to meet a certain standard.

[Rob Walsh]

Funding is a vehicle for all kinds of creativity, and it may well be the case that, through funding, solutions can be found that can't be found by virtue of legislative restrictions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you.

Ms. Hughes.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

I want to go back to the “necessarily incidental” quote. In your document it refers to labour, but if it was determined that to facilitate immigration the federal government had to legislate credential recognition, would that fall under “necessarily incidental”?

[Rob Walsh]

Every case has to be looked at on its own merits. Sorry, did you have a particular area in mind when you asked your question?

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

I was wondering whether or not that piece of it would fall under there. Did this come up when the program was created? I'm referring to that fine line again.

[Rob Walsh]

I'm sure the government took advice from its lawyers regarding the Constitution, but I don't imagine there was a lot of time spent on that. Clearly, they are responsible for immigration, and they recognized there was a need for a program to facilitate the assimilation of immigrants into Canada professionally, so they launched this program to try to make the provinces into some kind of level playing field.

They haven't legislated, I don't believe, for this program. I stand to be corrected, but I don't believe they have legislated for this program. Were they to legislate for this program, they would have the burden of showing that the legislation, if it touched labour or education, was necessarily incidental to their immigration jurisdiction. It might be hard to show that regulating professional qualifications was necessarily incidental to immigration. That might be a bit of a stretch. “Necessarily incidental” means you can't really do a job in this field unless you also deal with these issues. You can't really regulate airlines unless you deal with their labour problems. That's why you have a Canada Labour Code. You can't really legislate on banking unless you have the power to deal with some other issues that arise under banking.

Can you not deal with immigration without dealing with professional qualifications? That's the question? Arguably you might well be able to adequately deal with immigration issues without dealing with labour or education. But that's the issue. Anything they did in the area of education or labour would have to be shown to be necessarily incidental to their exercising their legislative authority over immigration.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

One more quick one. I'm wondering if the agreement on internal trade affects our consideration of foreign credentials under this program.

[Rob Walsh]

The agreement on what?

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

The agreement on internal trade, whether or not it affects our consideration of foreign credentials. We talked about mobility a while ago, and I'm wondering if--

[Rob Walsh]

I don't know the details of that agreement, but if that's the internal free trade agreement, if you like, between the provinces, to the extent that any regulatory regime in a province presented a barrier to economic trade, the argument could be made that the regulatory regime is not really there for bona fide regulatory purposes; it's there to protect local jobs or to prevent trade with another province. That's a matter of debate, argument, and ultimately, I suppose, it might be a matter for the courts to decide, were it brought to the courts.

I couldn't answer specifically without examining more closely the terms of that agreement and what's actually being done as to whether what's being done represents such an exaggerated regulatory regime that it starts to look like it's an obstruction to the free trade of goods.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

We have time for another round of five minutes.

Mr. Shory, would you like to go ahead?

[Devinder Shory, Conservative, Calgary Northeast, AB]

Thank you once again, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Walsh, I would agree that specifically in our profession I have seen the change, and I'll answer some of my colleague's concerns also.

For a few years I had been trying to get into different universities in different provinces, and there were different standards. That obviously has changed now. As a lawyer you can virtually go to any province, and for a certain period you don't have to go through any requirements. You simply put your name in and you can pursue your profession, as far as the lawyers are concerned.

From all this discussion today, I want you to reconfirm my understanding that as far as recognition of foreign qualifications or evaluation is concerned, the federal government can take the leadership role by facilitating or assisting or encouraging the provinces and territories to get onboard and work together to recognize the foreign qualifications, but nothing more than that. They cannot force any province, any regulatory body, to follow suit, to recognize qualifications in any specific manner.

Is that my correct understanding?

[Rob Walsh]

I believe that is the correct understanding, yes.