The Declaration filed by Canada at the time the Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications was ratified sets out the responsibilities of stakeholders.
To our knowledge, immigration officers stationed abroad are not trained to assess international credentials. Hopefully, changes will be made to the selection process to bring the assessment of foreign schooling levels in line with international criteria, or at least, to entrust the process to trained credential evaluators, prior to immigration officers reviewing an immigration application. We believe that education points awarded during the selection process should not be based on the number of years of schooling. A better approach would be to base them on the level of the credentials produced, ideally following an assessment of such credentials by recognized Canadian services. Foreign credentials can be compared by international analysts trained here in Canada with Canadian credentials.
As a country, we have an obligation to new immigrants. It is important that each immigrant obtain a comparative assessment of his or her credentials. We are, however, concerned with current initiatives that would allow these individuals to obtain certificates that is not recognized by competent authorities. In the long run, this could prove detrimental to the integration of new immigrants.
We would also like to commend the authorities at the Foreign Credentials Referral Office. This office seems to grasp the importance of performing fair and credible comparative evaluations of foreign credentials. In recent meetings, we have offered the Office our full cooperation.
CICIC's main objective is to work with its partners to develop tools to facilitate the assessment of assessing foreign credentials. The Centre works closely with a well-established international network of some 53 countries, as well as with all of Canada's provinces and territories, several federal departments, national associations and a number of sectoral councils. We promote the tools available to carry out fair and equitable comparative evaluations.
Access to quality assessments is, in our view, the collective responsibility of the federal government and of the provinces.
We have four recommendations to make to the committee. Firstly, we would like to see immigration authorities attach greater importance to the provisions of the Lisbon Convention, or treaty, to its recommendations and to its Codes of Good Practice.
Secondly, immigration officers working abroad need to obtain information on foreign credentials from Canadian sources, not from foreign countries, when awarding education points to prospective immigrants, to minimize the risk of divergent assessments.
Thirdly, the Immigration Act should be amended to change the method of calculating education points to a basis derived from the level of schooling, rather then the number of years of schooling, and to require a comparative evaluation...