To be honest, it's difficult to measure how effective it has been statistically, because all the work we do is trying to change systems. We don't control the professional licensing bodies that make the actual decisions. We play a facilitative role trying to coax and prod provinces and through them the licensing bodies to get with the program and to speed up and simplify the process for foreign credential recognition and assessment.
In that regard, my view is we've made a lot of progress. This stuff doesn't make headlines, but it's hard, difficult, technical, granular work. In this thing called a pan-Canadian framework for the assessment and recognition of foreign qualifications, there's a big federal investment of $50 million. We're paying to bring together all 10 of the provincial licensing bodies as we work through the 40-plus licensed professions to get them to one table and hammer out simplified, streamlined procedures for credential assessment and recognition. By the way, this has the happy effect of enabling greater interprovincial labour mobility for Canadians.
We've gone through 14 of the 40-plus regulated professions. We're about to launch work on another several. We're identifying those professions that I'll say are more eager to participate. Some professions still seem to be stuck in an old-school protectionist or gatekeeping attitude. I think we need to start naming and shaming some of them.
Finally, I think we are having good effect with things like the foreign credential recognition loans pilot project. We've done a thousand of those loans, delivered through non-profit groups that have worked out arrangements with financial institutions to provide loans of up to $10,000 on preferential terms as bridge financing. This is to help foreign professionals stuck in survival jobs to maybe take some time off their survival jobs to get college diplomas, pay for their certification exams, and do what they need to do to get that little increment in skills and education so they can get their credential and get to work in their profession. Again, it's only a thousand, but that's a good pilot, and the results are phenomenally positive.
Finally, we are doing pre-arrival work overseas, such as through the Canadian immigration integration program delivered by the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, through centres abroad where we invite selected economic immigrants to come in for free to a seminar that includes personalized counselling on how to get ready for the Canadian labour market. We point them to where they can apply for their credentials in advance, and maybe backfilling they need to do in their education before they get to Canada as permanent residents. Again, the results in that population in terms of their employment have seemed to be extremely positive. I think CIC is doing a formal evaluation that will be forthcoming.
To be honest, we're dealing with relatively small numbers of people in those two programs. If we were to roll these out to affect hundreds of thousands of people, the costs would probably be in the tens of billions of dollars.
We're trying to play a facilitative and leadership role in this area. I think the situation is.... The most important thing is the reforms we're making to the immigration system by doing a qualitative assessment of people's education and credentials in the application process, so we stop the craziness of ascribing the same value to a degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, which is the MIT of Asia, as we do to the dodgiest college that is a degree mill.
We used to ascribe the same points, the same credibility, in our immigration selection process to the highest quality and the lowest quality degrees and diplomas. Now we are making a qualitative assessment of those people whose degrees or professional credentials are likely to be recognized as being at or close to the Canadian standard. Those are the folks we're seeking to give admission to, so they don't end up driving cabs and working in corner stores.
