Thank you.
I can actually provide a clarification. The Colour of Poverty campaign uses this definition, that race is a social construct; it uses “racialized” in that context. What it would mean is someone who is not white, regardless of their country of origin and country of birth. Because of the way migration patterns have emerged in the last 25 years or so, country of birth is not a predictor of race. I hope that clears it up.
We found a strong intersection between race and poverty. What this means is that the cost of the actual process is prohibitive for many immigrants. Most are among the working poor, even though they work more than 35 hours a week just to meet basic living costs, and many cannot afford the fees, as I said before, to complete an assessment or write a test, and they don't have the resources to complete a practicum.
Our second recommendation is that together with subsidized placement opportunities, the federal government invest in a grant rather than a loan program for those of low-income background who seek to have credentials recognized.
The third piece is labour market integration. OCASI believes that any analysis of the foreign credentials recognition challenge must look at labour market integration, because after all, immigrants pursue credentials recognition for a purpose, primarily to work. This is the single largest gap that we have found in any government investment in this process, whether it is at the federal or provincial level. Most initiatives we have found are good. They are welcome, they are important and they are a good start, but most of them have focused on improving the immigrant, building a better immigrant, so to speak, and they have paid little or no attention to dismantling labour market barriers, to actually using the now-recognized credentials to get and retain a job in one's field.
For example, the federal government recently introduced The Employer's Roadmap. It is an amazing tool. It's a useful first step in addressing this challenge because it gives employers the information they need to hire an internationally trained worker. But this alone is not sufficient to facilitate labour market integration. It doesn't address, it cannot address, systemic barriers such as racism and xenophobia, which is a very real phenomenon that many immigrants encounter in the labour market. While the information the road map provides to employers is useful, it assumes that most employers are willing to hire internationally trained workers, which is why they are seeking that information. We feel this assumption is dangerous.
What we recommend is that the federal government should invest in tax subsidies or other financial incentives for employers to actually take that step, to hire internationally trained workers. We also urge the federal government to look at its own hiring practices to comply more effectively with federal employment equity legislation. We know that federally regulated private sector employers such as financial institutions are doing far better than the federal government in practising employment equity, particularly in hiring members of racialized communities, including recent immigrants. The federal government needs to do better in this area.
One suggestion we have in that area is to look at contract compliance; that is, if the government subcontracts to a third party, a requirement would be written into the contract so that the third-party contractor would also follow employment equity.
Finally, we strongly urge you to look at the data collection piece, because right now we actually don't have a good picture of what immigrants' experience is in labour market integration and in pursuing credentials recognition. What we would like to see is disaggregated data, that is data disaggregated by race and gender, which gives us a better picture of where the gaps are and who is affected, because we know that these initiatives don't impact on everyone in the same way. They're actually quite different.
We would like you to take a look at collecting that kind of data, which is critically important and which can actually work very well with the work that Statistics Canada has already undertaken in this area.
Thank you.