Thanks.
I should point out that for several years we've had a foreign credential recognition program situated in the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development Canada. That is the program and the ministry that has been the interface on the federal side with the licensing bodies. Minister Finley has taken the lead on this issue, working with the provinces with particular intensity since the first ministers' agreement in January of this year.
Obviously we don't have a direct oversight role with respect to the some 440 licensing bodies in Canada. They are creatures of the provincial governments, which under the Constitution, of course, have exclusive jurisdiction in their domains for labour market regulation, including for the regulated professions. It's principally the provinces that have been the interlocutors, but some of what I would call perhaps the more progressive professional agencies have gotten into a dialogue with the federal government through HRSDC and the FCR program.
We've been able to identify, of the 40-plus regulated professions, which of them are more willing to knock down some of the barriers to credential recognition for newcomers. The list of eight that we announced yesterday is a pretty good indication of the ones who are willing to play ball.
Some of the major professional agencies—let's make no bones about this—are less willing to collaborate, less willing to streamline the process, cut the red tape, and reduce the processing times. I have to share the observation that some of them appear to be acting in a way as to keep closed labour markets and to keep closed the doors of opportunity for foreign-trained professions, and that is a shame.
We are exercising political pressure, as are the provincial governments—Ontario through it's fairness commissioner, and B.C. with the recent legislation. We are putting considerable pressure on those agencies not to reduce their standards, but to streamline the process. As I keep saying, we can't guarantee a yes answer, but we should offer them a clear, transparent, and fairly brief process so they can get a yes or a no.
An example is the medical profession. Here we have a profession that is much in demand in Canada and we have foreign-trained doctors who are clearly not getting licence to practice. It's not just foreign-trained doctors. I have a constituent, born in Canada, who went down to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the United States, got his M.D., got his specialization, and came back to Alberta where he found that it was going to take him a couple of years to be able to practise. He went back to the United States. There are hundreds of cases like that.
So we hope that next year, in the second year of the pan-Canadian framework rollout, the relevant colleges and licensing bodies in the medical profession will come to the table and give us a streamlined process for a maximum one-year answer on applications to be licensed.