May I respond?
I'd like to start with that one, because we have seen that in a smaller scale with the Royal Bank of Canada. Currently the chair of our council is Gord Nixon from RBC. A number of years ago, the Royal Bank experimented and removed the place of education from their application form. You would just put down “Bachelor of Commerce” or “MBA”. You didn't say where you got it or what the institution was. What they found was that more applicants made it further along the process. When a hiring decision was going to be made, then they would go into verifying their credentials and qualifications. You would move further along the stream because the lens of judging where that degree came from had been removed.
I think there is absolutely opportunity for that. Inherently, when people are reviewing résumés or are participating in that screening and hiring process, they apply what is familiar to them in their decision-making. The more you are able to change how that works, the better. I don't know that it necessarily....
I think there are two ways you can do that. You can look at a centralized CV system or what have you. Alternatively, a lot of the work we have been doing has been focused on retraining and on creating an immigration lens for HR professionals. We are working with the HR professional associations so that the next generation of HR professionals will be looking at this issue very differently. Although great strides were made 30 years ago in putting a lens for women in the workplace into the HR practice, and then one for racialized communities or visible minorities in the workplace, we don't yet have that level of practice in the HR profession. I think that's where we would see the very thing you're talking about.
I would like to add one more comment, which goes back to your colleague's point around whether this should be federal or provincial. I think you're speaking very much to those professions that are regulated. Even many engineers don't need to get a P.Eng. to practise. They can be employed as engineers without the full complement of tasks or responsibilities. The vast majority, close to 70% to 80%, of skilled immigrants coming into this country are non-regulated, so I think it's a bit of both: I think we look at federal solutions as well as provincial. There is jurisdiction for those regulated pieces, but many people are not part of that jurisdictional tension.