Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 1st, 2018

[The Chair (Mr. Robert Oliphant (Don Valley West, Lib.)), Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I'm going to call this meeting to order. This is the 130th meeting of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, as we continue our study of migration challenges and opportunities for Canada in the 21st century.

The witnesses have been told a bit about our study. We are continuing to look at all the patterns, the influences and the experiences of both forced and voluntary migration, and what is going on in the world in terms of people moving. That also extends to Canada's response to that, whether our responses are appropriate or not, and what Canada's needs and responsibilities are in the area of migrating people.

We thank you for attending. In this panel we have three witnesses—one from the Conference Board of Canada and two as individuals.

We're going to begin with Ms. Long, who is coming to us via video conference from my hometown, Toronto.

You have seven minutes.

[Elizabeth Long, Barrister and Solicitor, Long Mangalji LLP, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for having me here. My name is Elizabeth Long. I'm an immigration lawyer. I've been certified by the Law Society of Ontario as a specialist in immigration law. Throughout the last 14 years, I've worked with thousands of workers to help them immigrate to Canada.

I would like to start by telling you about my first experience in an immigration office. It was when I was a child. My father had applied for permanent residence through one of the first skilled worker programs in the eighties. In those days, in order to pass, we had to go for an interview. At the interview, the officer asked my father, “Why should I let you stay?” My father provided him with his thesis on artificial intelligence, which he had completed for his Ph.D. program at Simon Fraser University. The officer threw that to the side and said, “That doesn't matter.” My father said, “I've been offered a position at Memorial University in Newfoundland as an assistant professor.” The officer said, “So what?” It was then that our immigration lawyer stood up, looked the officer dead straight in the eye, and said, “If you don't want these people in Canada, who do you want in Canada?”

This is the question that underlies the basis of the economic immigration programs in Canada: Who do we want in Canada? I would submit that a formulated points system is not as good an indicator of desirability as is the Canadian labour market itself. Let me first point to a few problematic assumptions that plague the current economic immigration programs today.

Let's first look at how the points system is determined. Analysts who have set the criteria for such programs as the express entry and caregiver programs have told me that one of the main tools to make decisions on desirability is to compare the income tax statements of two groups. For example, high-skilled workers as a group earn more than low-skilled workers; therefore, only high-skilled workers are needed in Canada. Immigrants who speak a higher level of English earn more money than do people who speak a lower level of English; therefore, we need only people who speak a higher level of English.

The assumption that only rich workers are valuable to Canada is clearly faulty. Taking that faulty assumption and using it, then, to formulate the criteria for our immigration programs leaves behind many people who are wanted and needed in Canada.

Another problematic assumption is that there is a clear line between high-skilled and low-skilled work, and that only high-skilled workers are valuable in Canada. The NOC codes that define high-skilled and low-skilled work were never created for immigration purposes. They were created by a group of people in Service Canada for statistical analysis. They were then adopted by the immigration department, which perceived this as an easy way to determine desirability. Surely we need only high-skilled work in Canada, right?

So what's “high-skilled” and what's “low-skilled”? Let me list a number of occupations and see if you can figure out which one is high-skilled and which one is low-skilled. Let's take an office situation. A receptionist? Low-skilled. Secretary? High-skilled. Bookkeeper? High-skilled. Accounting clerk? Low-skilled. Medical assistant? High-skilled. Dental assistant? Low-skilled. Hairdresser? High-skilled. Esthetician? Low-skilled.

As you can see, it is not altogether clear why one occupation is considered high-skilled and another is considered low-skilled. There are also clear gender biases in the categorization. For example, personal support workers, who require college certification, and sewing machine operators, who need extensive training, are low-skilled workers. Construction workers, such as house painters and drywallers, who often haven't even finished high school, are high-skilled workers.

Furthermore, how can we assume that we need only high-skilled workers in Canada, when oftentimes some of the most-needed workers in Canada are those working in jobs that Canadians can't or won't do, such as truck drivers, caregivers, farm workers and the list goes on?

In the end, one of the best indicators of who is needed in Canada are people who are already working in Canada, have done so for an extended period of time, and have permanent job offers. They are clearly able and willing to settle in Canada, and clearly wanted in Canada. To subject them to the rigmarole of having to undergo English exams and a competitive process like the express entry system, which pits them against people who have never set foot in Canada, leaves many workers without the ability to obtain permanent residence. This simply does not make sense.

My proposal would be to have a category to allow to immigrate those who are already working legally in Canada, who have done so for a year and who have permanent job offers. They should not have to undergo the English exams or prove that their work fits into one of the arbitrary categorizations of high-skilled or low-skilled work in order to gain permanent residence.

As you may well have heard in the rallying cry of businesses, unions and workers throughout Canada, if someone is good enough to work, they should be good enough to stay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Jeremic, you go second.

[Aleksandar Jeremic, Barrister and Solicitor, Anchor Law, As an Individual]

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to participate here today.

I'll begin by telling you a bit about the perspective I'm going to make my statements from. I'm a sole practitioner immigration lawyer in Toronto. I largely do refugee work, though I also do some work with economic migrants. My understanding is that the context under which I came to the attention of the committee was that I happened to represent a very nice woman who made a refugee claim with her daughter. Her 8-year-old daughter was accepted as a refugee, but she was not. She was put in a position where she could potentially be deported, while her daughter has every right to stay in Canada.

Now, I also understand that the topic of today's sitting of the committee is voluntary migration. Refugees aren't necessarily often seen to be voluntary migrants, so I'll begin by making a general point there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Just to let you know, you are free to use this time as you would like and as you think would be most helpful for the whole committee.

[Aleksandar Jeremic]

All right.

The point I was going to make was that apart from the refugees Canada resettles from UNHCR camps abroad, such as the Syrians we hear so much about, there are voluntary or what we can call “self-selecting” refugees who make it to our border, either through the United States—the “irregular” arrivals we hear about—or through arriving on some kind of visa and then making a refugee claim.

I urge the committee to be aware that a lot of people who come this way, and who we as refugee and immigration lawyers often see, are often very sophisticated people. They're very well-educated people. They can even be wealthy people, because the persecution in their home countries that causes them to leave has nothing to do with poverty. Very wealthy, very smart people can be saying the wrong things about their government. They can be asserting rights that we consider fundamental rights in this country. They risk persecution because of that, and they choose Canada as a place to go and to try to seek protection in. In that sense, they have a lot of agency about where they will go and where they will seek protection.

There are some specific recommendations I can make in the context of their experiences. For example, the nature of the system sometimes creates odd outcomes. You can have a child who, because of her own risk, independent of her parent's risk, is accepted as a refugee but the parent isn't. That parent is often the sole provider for that child as their caregiver in Canada. In this instance, an eight-year-old girl has every right to remain in Canada, but her mother has no automatic mechanism to stay, because her own risk, as assessed by the tribunal, is not seen to be significant enough to grant her protection. This causes the parent to have to apply for permanent residence through humanitarian grounds, which again engages the bureaucracy in an application that will almost certainly be approved.

That raises the question of why we are forcing this parent to engage the resources of the government in an application that will almost certainly be approved because of the facts. We don't have a mechanism for a person like that to stay with their child, who is recognized to be a convention refugee.

There's another thing I often hear in this context. Often families can't make it to Canada together. For example, a father will make it here, but his wife and their children will remain abroad. The father will be accepted as a refugee. As an accepted protected person, he can apply for permanent residence and bring his family here once that PR application is processed and approved, but that can take at least a year. During that year, the family members who remain in the country of origin can be at great risk. The persecution doesn't stop, and it often involves the entire family. Again, there is no mechanism for those family members of a recognized and accepted refugee to come to Canada until the entire family's permanent residence application is processed. It's very ad hoc. It relies on trying to track down the officer who is working on the PR application, urging them to speed it up, essentially relying on their goodwill and discretion to maybe push it along a bit faster. That's something I often hear.

The next point touches a little bit on what the previous witness spoke about. Although refugees, once they have made a claim, have a right to apply for a work permit and work in Canada, the system is designed in such a way that the work experience, regardless of what it is, low-skilled or high-skilled, can absolutely not be used in an application to stay through an economic program. Once you've come here and asked for protection, that is the only way you can stay. You have to rely on that refugee claim. There is no way to stay by transitioning to another immigration stream.

You're waiting for your hearing, you've been working, you've been contributing to Canada's economy and to society, but there's no way for you to rely on that to apply for PR and get out of what I'll call the protection system.

Again, it's because of this idea that the refugees who come here and ask for Canada's help are purely a drain on our resources, and that we're doing it purely for humanitarian reasons. There is very little recognition that even though they're not selected for these points systems and the economic streams, they actually make a significant contribution to society.

I'm about at my seven minutes, so I'll stop there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Antunes.

[Pedro Antunes, Deputy Chief Economist and Executive Director, The Conference Board of Canada]

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for having me here. I'm Pedro Antunes, deputy chief economist at the Conference Board.

I guess what we can bring today is perhaps a perspective that is a little different from some of the other testimony today and that you might have heard prior to today, because we essentially try to look forward in our analysis. We've done some timely work that this committee might be interested in, around the different economic scenarios and how they play out based on different immigration assumptions.

We've put out a report entitled “Canada 2040: No Immigration Versus More Immigration”. If I may, I will submit it to the committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Yes, you may.

[Pedro Antunes]

I've been at the Conference Board, I have to confess, for a very long time. I'm in the forecasting business, if you like. It's a tough business, and people often criticize how we can get the next few quarters or the next year right, or how we can guess what the next economic scuttlebutt will be, based on tariffs or trade or whatever other issues. I would turn that around. When we start thinking about the longer term, about the demographics of the economy—what we call the supply side of the economy—that tends to be a lot more solid.

I remember when we started to do long-term forecasts all those years ago. One of the first issues that came up was that, in our models, our unemployment rate would start to go south and all of a sudden turn negative, which in fact can't happen, so we knew we had a problem. Since then, we have focused very much on issues around productivity and immigration, because of this looming baby-boom cohort exodus that is essentially going to drive down economic growth going forward.

The report that we will submit looked at what Canada would look like in a no-immigration assumption. We know that's impossible. Economists are always trying to imagine crazy, hypothetical scenarios. However, it allows us to look, in the baseline scenario, at the contribution of immigration to the economy and, in a higher immigration scenario, at how that changes and looks going forward.

I'll give you some highlights of what we found.

What's really timely is that we've just received, I think yesterday, the new immigration targets for the next three years. They align very much with our getting to the 1% immigration assumption scenario. Those targets are looking at getting to 350,000 by 2021, which is essentially what we have in this report. That's about 0.9% of the population. It's certainly a little higher than what we've had in the past. In the last 15 or 20 years, we've had in-migration at about 0.8% of the population. That's adding a little bit. We're heading toward 1%, but that's in a scenario, a background, where essentially the aging of the population is causing the natural rate, that is, births less deaths, to contribute less and less.

Currently, immigration contributes to about 70% of overall population growth. By the time we get to 2034, immigration will forcibly account for all of population growth. If you have immigration at 1%, there's also emigration, so you can think that we're going to be between 0.8% population growth and 1% population growth, depending on those numbers, but probably around 0.8% or 0.9%. That would be a slight decline, but it would be fairly stable population growth compared to what we've had in the past.

In our assumptions, we looked very carefully.... In fact, in those same targets, we've assumed that the share of economic versus family versus refugee stays about the same. Those shares are about 58%, 26%, 16%, in order. We've made those assumptions in our scenarios as well. We look very carefully, and we track. As immigrants come in, we know that they make a certain percentage less than the average wage in Canada in year one, year two, etc., depending on the class. We track that all the way through the immigration streams that we're adjusting over time. We've done a careful job there.

What that allows us to do, then, is look at these scenarios. For a set of economic indicators that may be of interest—for example GDP, which is essentially just income, as I'm sure you all know—we can look at indicators such as the number of workers to retirees—dependency ratios, if you will. We can look at one of the biggest challenges for Canada, which is health care costs as a share of revenues—which is obviously a provincial issue—and other indicators, such as GDP per capita, etc.

What are the challenges? Let me start with the health care challenge. I think what we see with the higher immigration assumption versus immigration as is—the status quo scenario—is that essentially we have health care costs now as about 35% of provincial government revenues, and no matter what, they're going to increase.

In a low immigration scenario, they would increase to about 43% of provincial government revenues. In a 1% immigration world, we could bring that down to about 39%. This is by the time we get to 2040, so this is a long-term perspective. These are important challenges because as you eat up more of this share, it leaves less ability to do other things with your revenues.

We think that in a 1% scenario, GDP would stay in line with recent history: that is, about 2% of the economy. Remember that our trend GDP used to grow closer to 3% just in the early 2000s, so this demographic change around the labour force is having a very important impact on our ability to grow revenues. We can't get away with that, no matter what, but we can dampen the effects by looking essentially at how immigration plays in that role.

I'll just give you a quick example. I talk to organizations and people in the private and public sector who are looking at the challenge around hiring. The challenge around hiring is a very high rate of retirement, and that's only going to continue to climb. We think all baby boomers are out of the workforce; that's absolutely not true. It's just the front-end boomers, a small cohort. In recent years, the retirement rate has increased from about 0.95% of the labour force to 1.2%. That means 170,000 retirees just a few years ago, in 2010, and today we're at 230,000 to 240,000 retirees. For organizations looking to grow their workforce, it's essentially about one for one: For every one net new person you add to your workforce, you also have to add an additional person to replace a retiree.

Here are some of the other ratios. The worker-to-retiree ratio currently in Canada is 3.6 workers per retiree. Again, no matter what, that is going to grow over the next decade and a half, but with a 1% immigration scenario we mitigate that to about 2.6 workers per retiree. We go from 3.6 to 2.6, rather than 3.6 to 2. That's just another statistic to give you a sense of how important these changes are.

There are a lot of details in the report, but also some important observations we've done in previous work. It's not just growth for the sake of growth; it's growth for these reasons that I've talked about. It's not just bringing in immigration in terms of numbers. It's also very important to ensure, as some of the prior testimony has indicated, that people have the ability to participate more fully in the workforce.

We know this is a problem. We've looked at some of those costs, and we think that things around credentialing alone cost the economy and the individuals—I'm macro, always thinking about the big picture, but obviously this is an advantage for both—around $13 billion to $17 billion a year.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I need you to wrap up.

[Pedro Antunes]

In terms of those settlement services, language training and credential recognition are really important to labour market outcomes.

The last point I want to make is about perceptions. We have to be careful about perceptions. We've seen protectionist rhetoric drive up an agenda in the U.S. that is completely off what I think is economic understanding, and we need to be aware that perceptions are important in this space as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you.

We'll now go to questions. Mrs. Zahid, go ahead.

[Salma Zahid, Scarborough Centre, Lib.]

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses for their important testimony.

Mr. Antunes, I was going through your report, “Canada 2040: No Immigration Versus More Immigration”. You wrote about the role of the family class in supporting economic immigration and the need to boost the labour market outcomes for this category. Have you studied the impact that reuniting the family has on the prospects of economic class immigrants, having the family together for support and removing the stress of separation?

[Pedro Antunes]

Yes, I think all of these things play out. I once had a colleague who's also an economist tell me that economists are like artists—they try to paint reality with the fewest brush strokes possible.

I have to confess that we haven't dug into monetizing or making assumptions that would allow us to give you an economic impact of family reunification. We do know that there are all sorts of effects in terms of providing support to family, especially where we see small businesses that lack support and may not have access to capital and financing as readily as other entrepreneurs. We do see stronger families playing a role in some of these areas.

The assumptions we've made around the family class and the refugee class are straight from the historical data. I think we've taken a conservative approach. We have not bettered the outcomes of immigrants in Canada in the scenarios that we've built, but I think that all of these things, including better settlement, better language and essentially seeing better labour market outcomes, would obviously be an upside to the scenarios you have.

[Salma Zahid]

I represent a riding where people from across the world have settled. They run family businesses. They're small businesses that are creating good middle-class jobs. I think that where they have their families to give them a hand, that really helps them a lot in those cases. What would you say in regard to creating more middle-class jobs and how these new immigrants who are coming in and creating more businesses are helping?

[Pedro Antunes]

Yes, absolutely. I think it's just that when we get to the data at that level, the micro kind of data, it's harder to find and harder to compile all of that information and give you a number, top line. I would say that there is clear evidence, absolutely. There's anecdotal evidence. There are people in the field who do more qualitative research and can give you a better sense of these types of impacts, but yes, we acknowledge in the report that family class is important and also helps stimulate economic outcomes.

[Salma Zahid]

We are going to hear in the next hour from Michael Donnelly from the University of Toronto, whose research on Canadian support for immigration shows that Canadians are less supportive of immigration than we often assume, and that Canada is not immune to the sort of anti-immigrant rhetoric we are seeing elsewhere.

I know that it's not possible for you to summarize your whole report, but in brief, what would be the impact of sharply reducing the immigration levels? Do you think the numbers Professor Donnelly found could be different if more Canadians were aware of the consequences?

[Pedro Antunes]

We did build a no-immigration scenario. Again, it's counterfactual, but essentially we see GDP or income growth slow to about 1%. I think there are significant costs that we need to be aware of beyond just growth for the sake of growth. I talked about some of them. These kinds of ratios with respect to labour markets dependency are very important pieces that would only get worse in a zero-immigration scenario.

Beyond that, Canada is a big country, and I think one of the challenges for immigration is to see if we can get more immigration in areas where we're seeing slower population growth. We see the challenges faced by some of the Atlantic provinces, for example. Some have had success in terms of being attractive to immigration and holding onto their immigrant population.

Essentially, there are challenges with economies that have very weak economic growth or very weak population growth. It's much easier to get into a market where there is some economic growth and some potential for you to attract investment and people, rather than to try to take away market share from somebody else who's already there. We even hear about small towns having to close at some point. Shutting down a town is a huge cost. I think Canada has room for more immigration.

To go back to the perception issue, I think we need to be careful and we need to be aware of it. I think we need to better educate folks. This is part and parcel of what we're trying to do with some of the immigration research we put out. Also, I think we need to be flexible. If we see spaces where technology, for example, is replacing workers, we need to be aware of that and be proactive about it. If we see a business cycle hit us—and one will hit us sooner or later—I think we need to be able to adjust to those scenarios.

[Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

Ms. Long, during many of our previous testimonies we heard about the relationship between the legal and the irregular migration streams. We heard about how cutting down on the availability of regular and legal immigration streams usually leads to an increase in migrants seeking out irregular channels, often at risk and at much cost. Can you please talk about the relationship between legal and irregular channels? Are there some legal changes that should be made in Canada to discourage irregular migration?

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Please be very brief.

[Elizabeth Long]

Yes.

When the law is such that people cannot stay after they work.... For example, there was a change a few years ago by the Conservatives that limited the workers to staying for four years. The “four-in, four-out” rule forced thousands of workers to suddenly wake up one day and all be illegal. It's things like that—when the law does not make sense, creates havoc, and creates a lot of difficulty for people—that are completely unnecessary. We need to create laws where, if we attract people to Canada and they are contributing to Canada....

Clearly, as we've heard, the people are needed. Immigration is needed in Canada. We need to be a country, then, that encourages them to stay, and not a country that—

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Sorry, I'm afraid I need to end it there. Someone may follow up with a question on that topic.

Mr. Tilson, go ahead.

[David Tilson, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Jeremic, do you know how many asylum seekers or refugees of any class are employed or unemployed?

[Aleksandar Jeremic]

Well, initially, immediately after their arrival.... I'm talking about people who make their own way to Canada and then make a refugee claim. That's whom I see through my practice. I do not see resettled refugees. There's basically nothing for us lawyers to do once Canada has given them permanent residence.

Initially, they're not employed, simply because it takes a few months for them to get a work permit, but once they have one, virtually all of them work.