Thank you, Chair.
Welcome--although I have to start by saying that we also claim Santa Claus, so we may have to work on where Santa Claus really lives.
I'm a member of the New Democratic Party, which is the social democratic/ democratic socialist party in Canada. I represent a riding in a suburb of Vancouver in British Columbia. My riding has about a 50% immigrant and refugee population, which is pretty typical of many of the ridings in the Vancouver area.
In my area, the largest immigrant population group is Chinese, either from the People's Republic, from Hong Kong or from Taiwan. So about 30% of the folks in my riding speak Chinese, either Cantonese or Mandarin. The next largest group is Korean, and then there are some European and Central American groups after that. There is a significant newcomer population in the area, which presents certain challenges.
It means that as an elected representative I have to have a communications strategy that incorporates some communications in other languages outside of the official languages of Canada. My office staff speak a total of seven other languages including Cantonese, Mandarin, Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, and Hindi, because there is a South Asian community associated there as well. Having that kind of language capacity is also important so they can assist people who don't have English or French language skills yet, largely in dealing with immigration difficulties.
Settlement issues are a huge problem: how you integrate someone into Canadian society and the resources that are available to do that.
Right now there are large inconsistencies across Canada with regard to that. There is some dispute about what the numbers are, but it looks like Quebec gets about $4,000 per immigrant to do settlement work and language training; Ontario gets about $3,800, or will get that soon under the terms of a new agreement it has with the federal government; and British Columbia gets probably around $1,000 per immigrant. So there is a wide variation in what the federal government transfers to the provinces, because the provinces make these decisions.
Those things have a dramatic effect on people's ability to be part of Canadian society and the attachment they feel to Canadian society. I think your question about the events of last weekend may be one of the issues we need to deal with in that context.
We know that the people who have the greatest difficulty settling are often adults who have come without English or French language skills, and teenagers who come. Younger children adapt very easily through the school system and learn very quickly, but those groups present particular challenges in all of that.
It's interesting to hear you describe the issues that Finland is facing, because they are exactly the same issues Canada is facing. Our population is aging. By the middle of the next decade we expect that all job growth will come solely from immigration. By the mid-2020s we expect all of our population growth to come solely from immigration. That is the point at which it becomes a question of our social programs and how we pay for them. We need that immigrant group to help us maintain the kinds of social programs that have meant so much to us in Canada. I think that's a real issue for us.
We are starting now to talk about a Canadian diaspora. For the first time there are Canadians living in other parts of the world in large numbers, particularly in Hong Kong and China. We're talking about folks who came and either had an experience that wasn't as positive as they expected, but became Canadian citizens and then went home to their country of origin, or, because economic conditions improved, returned to work in their homeland and may come back to Canada at some point. Planning for how that will work becomes an issue, but it is just not on our agenda yet.
We may get a bunch of retirees in 20 or 30 years, people who decide to retire back in Canada. How do we accommodate that movement back?
You asked about whether immigration should be work-based or have a social base to it. That is something we have struggled with in this committee. Right now our economic immigrants get here on a point system that tries to get the best and the brightest. That was the intent. So we give people points in our application process to get here, recognizing their work experience and their education, but then they get here and find out they can't work using that experience or that education. That's causing lots of anger and frustration in our system.
We have settlement workers now who have to have security because people are so angry about their experience of coming to Canada. So there's a disconnect between our application process and the reality of working in Canada, which is causing some significant problems. The recognition of international credentials is a piece of that.
Touring across the country last year, the committee discovered that often the happiest immigrants are people who come through family reunification, who came because they had families here. They don't have the same work or income expectations. They'll take a job that may not be the greatest job in the world, but because they're with family, they're happy and they have their social network in place. Their adaptation is often much better because of this.
It's interesting that Canada has talked about an official multiculturalism policy. We have determinedly not wanted to be the melting pot that the United States talks about being, in which you become part of a more homogenous culture. There's still some struggle around that in Canada.
In my constituency, it's more likely that you'll have a big Chinese new year's celebration than you will the calendar new year. That's a real change. I did more celebration of the Chinese new year this year than I did of the calendar new year, but that's very typical of the atmosphere now in my riding. There are some people who welcome that and there are other people who resist it, seeing it as an unwelcome change. So there are some social tensions around that policy, but overall it is working right now.
You wouldn't visit my area and come away with an impression that there was overt racism, dramatic incidents of racism, or real institutionalized discrimination in significant ways. That's working its way through. There's lots of intermarriage happening, so the nature of our community is changing through these means as well.
That's probably more than five minutes' worth of rambling, but anyway....
