Thank you for having me here today.
For those of you who don't know me, I'm a private bar lawyer with more than 20 years of experience, specialized in helping people to immigrate to and become citizens of Canada.
At the beginning of my career, I spent two years working with low-income clients, and for the remainder of my career, I've been assisting people of various economic backgrounds who can afford to pay for that service. I also do a significant amount of pro bono work for deserving clients who can't afford to pay.
Although I've never worked directly in settlement services, my profession takes me into almost daily contact with people who do provide such services. More importantly, I have more than 20 years of experience working with clients and observing how and why certain clients successfully transition into Canada while others fail to do so.
I noticed that a lot of the other witnesses whom you've called for this study on previous days have focused mostly on low-income families and refugees and how to better integrate them. As a result, I'd like to take a little bit of a different approach in my remarks today by focusing purely on economic immigrants and the reason why I believe Canada fails to retain and integrate many of them. I hope you find it sufficiently on topic.
Over the years, I've found myself increasingly disturbed about the amount of attrition I see in newcomers to Canada, as a result of our failing to retain and integrate them. What I mean is the degree of emigration from Canada that I observe. Literally, there is not a single day that goes by in my office that I don't speak to at least one person, and often more than one person, who went to a huge degree of effort and expense to become a permanent resident only to subsequently abandon Canada and return back to their home country.
Many of my colleagues describe the same experience, and I think if you multiply that across Canada, even anecdotally, we have a big problem. It strikes me as a terrible loss that we've put so much effort to attracting the best and the brightest to come to Canada, yet we've put comparatively little attention to tracking and understanding why people leave.
It's my observation that those client families who don't remain in Canada tend to leave for three main reasons.
Number one is economic. They can't find a job commensurate with their skills.
Number two is family ties. It's mostly parents who have been left behind.
Number three is that they never really intended to stay here in the first place.
I read with a lot of interest the brief that was filed by one of the organizational witnesses called MOSAIC. I agree with them wholeheartedly in their approach that Canadian work experience and re-skilling programs are totally crucial if you're going to address the gap between newcomer skills and the jobs that are actually available to them in Canada.
The world is a different place now from 20 years ago. Economic immigrants have a lot of choices for their future, and they don't want just any job; they want a good one that is commensurate with their experience. I've observed through my own client base and even just my own experience as a business owner that the options along the lines of those outlined by MOSAIC are extremely effective in achieving this. In fact, I have three people working for me full time who were hired through co-op placements, and two of those were new immigrants to Canada. So, mentorships, on-the-job training and co-op programs that introduce newcomers directly to employers in the workplace need to become the norm and not the exception.
A further observation is that those of my clients who obtained a Canadian educational credential either before or after immigration had much more success in economically establishing in Canada and were much more likely to stay in Canada over the long term. That's why a program like the Canadian experience class, for example, has been so successful.
For new permanent residents, however, often expense is the main challenge. I recommend prioritizing funding to subsidize re-education and re-skilling programs in a short period after arrival.
Family is also a main reason why people fail to successfully integrate and ultimately abandon Canada. Isolation, loneliness, lack of help with their children and concern for aging parents are powerful factors. In most countries of the world, people grow up in tight-knit, multi-generational families who often live together in one home and share responsibilities. Young families who immigrate to Canada lose that support network. The best-case scenario for a new immigrant family, even if they get a wonderful job immediately, is that they need at least three years of high-level tax returns before they can even think about applying to sponsor parents.
Realistically, it takes people more like five years.
I would recommend implementing ways to keep these families together from the start. One idea, for example, would be allowing economic class immigrants to include their parents on their application if they have sufficient funds to support that.
Another idea would be allowing people to sponsor their parents as caregivers for the grandchildren. In many cultures that's the norm, and it gives parents the opportunity to focus on career and education. There was, in fact, a recent Federal Court case in which the judge was openly perplexed as to why a visa officer would not consider allowing a caregiver work permit for grandparents when they clearly had raised several children of their own and had the relevant work experience.
Finally, my last observation—and I've said this publicly before—is that in general the more wealthy, accomplished and well established a person is in their home country, the less likely they intend to make Canada their permanent home. I've seen a huge amount of abuse in the immigration system by individuals who just use permanent residence as a way to get their dependants to Canada in order to benefit from the various things that we offer to our permanent residents, but have no genuine desire to stay here and contribute professionally or economically.
It makes sense to screen out such people at the time they apply for permanent residence, as opposed to trying to deal with the problem later when they fail to meet the residency obligation. The act contains a mechanism for guarding against it, but I've literally never seen it used, and I think it should be used. Under paragraph 20(1)(a) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, it is required that every foreign national who seeks to enter or remain in Canada as a permanent resident must establish that they've come to Canada in order to be a permanent resident and live here permanently.
I believe that officers need to be alert to that issue as a part of the application process. Applicants should be held to the proof of it, when requested, in order to prevent both abuse of the system and attrition of permanent residents whom we spend so much time trying to attract.