Citizenship and Immigration Committee on June 21st, 2021

[Leah Nord]

Thank you.

For all, regardless of entry classification, it is imperative to focus on labour market integration, as this sets new Canadians, their families and their chosen communities up for success from the outset.

Committee members, quite simply, hope is not a strategy. To effectively move forward in the recovery period we need local solutions built by communities for communities, with strong involvement of the business community to effectively address community workforce needs.

To this end, the Canadian Chamber supports the continued devolution of the immigration selection process. It started with the provincial nominee program, then the Atlantic immigration program and then recently RNIPs, as were just discussed by my colleagues from the Kootenays, and the promised municipal nominee program. However, these need to become widespread and permanent, not just piloted.

A positive out of the rural and northern immigration pilots was the requirement that local chambers or business association directives apply on behalf of the community, which has ensured the integrated presence of the business sector from the outset. Also, as was mentioned earlier, if funding implementation for those businesses and the work they do could be added, that would be greatly appreciated.

The Canadian Chamber has also long advocated for pathways to permanent residency for temporary permit holders. I was in front of this committee in April speaking about this in the context of temporary foreign workers. The same rings true for international students. Before the pandemic, I used to refer to the fact that there were half a million job vacancies across the country and 600,000 international students. Of course, there were some issues here with labour market alignment, but what I will say is that international students study at institutions in communities large and small and in rural locations across the country. The point is that they're already in these smaller, rural and remote communities. There is a real opportunity to keep many of them there and integrate them into these communities for the longer term.

The Canadian Chamber has a final cluster of recommendations that fall into the category of enhancing services to support settlement and labour market integration. I'll start with just a couple of data points to frame these recommendations.

I can cite any number of data sources that demonstrate how in this century, over the past two decades, the population in small centres and rural areas across Canada has been declining, especially in those areas with populations under 250,000.

In 2019 permanent and non-permanent immigration accounted for over 80% of Canada's population growth. As well, in 2019 almost 75% of immigrants chose to immigrate to one of six metropolitan areas.

With the one minute I have left I'll give you an array of policy recommendations by the Canadian Chamber that apply to rural and remote communities.

The first is to introduce a five-year pilot permanent residency category for low-skilled positions in areas with labour shortages to permit international workers who reside in communities of less than one million and who have at least two years of related work experience to qualify for permanent residency.

We have recommendations around regional strategies to apply the resources required to meet settlement needs for newcomers in all regions of the country. We recommend taking action to include a national vision and strategy aimed at increasing immigration to rural and northern communities across the country and, finally, to take action to develop a strategy to increase international student retention in rural and northern communities.

Thank you very much.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Madam Chair.

Did she freeze?

[The Clerk]

The chair's connection might be frozen. I'll check with IT.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Ms. Nord.

I'm sorry, I lost the connection but it came back.

We will suspend the meeting and come back after the votes. I request that members vote and then log back in. Then we will hear from the rest of the witnesses.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

We can stay logged in, Madam Chair, can't we?

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

It's up to the members.

We will suspend the meeting for a few minutes to allow the members to vote.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I will call the meeting to order seeing that we have quorum.

To all of our witnesses, I'm sorry for the interruption and for making you wait for almost half an hour.

We were hearing from our witnesses, and we will now hear from the two witnesses who are left.

We will hear from Peace by Chocolate Inc., represented by Tareq Hadhad, the owner and chief executive officer.

Mr. Hadhad, welcome to the committee. It's sad that we are not meeting in person. Otherwise, we could have tasted your chocolates.

[Tareq Hadhad, Owner and Chief Executive Officer, Peace by Chocolate Inc.]

That would be my hope too. Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thanks for appearing before the committee. You will have five minutes for your opening remarks. Please proceed.

[Tareq Hadhad]

Thank you, Madam Chair, vice-chairs and honourable members of the committee, for having me here. Happy National Indigenous Peoples Day.

I've been looking forward to my presentation in front of the committee for many reasons. You all are doing amazing jobs from your places to appreciate diversity and strengthen our country by living up to the values of compassion and empowerment for newcomers every day. My family and I came to Canada a few years ago after losing everything to the war in Syria. We have been in love with this country that restored our faith in humanity and our hope that what we lost can be rebuilt with the fortitude of the power and resiliency that's in each and every one of us.

Newcomers bring great skills and experiences with them. They are here to contribute and give back to their communities that they now call home. With other countries closing their doors and their borders, Canada is leading the world in attracting newcomers, and it's no surprise that Canada has been ranked the best country in the world this year.

Nova Scotia, for example, is a big part of that. It has done so much to help newcomers. In my area alone, I have met people from 35 countries who have started businesses here. On the other hand, we all know that immigrants are motivated to translate their skills and experiences into an opportunity for a life here. Entrepreneurship is only one way that immigrants give back to their new home, each by their unique remarkable and amazing values and culture they bring. They celebrate the true meaning of being Canadians.

As a newcomer family ourselves, we are bringing our values and our message. It's not just about business. By starting in our own town of Antigonish, which is home to 4,300 residents, we wanted to take advantage of the international stage to share this message.

Just a few years ago, we started a journey in Antigonish with Peace by Chocolate. There is something unique and special about small towns in Nova Scotia, like all the beautiful provinces in this country. We have believed since the beginning that our success story is not alone: There are thousands of Canadian success stories that should be shared around the world.

In Nova Scotia, people travel for job opportunities, going out west and to other places. We started Peace by Chocolate in 2016, a few months after arriving in Canada, because we believed that we came to Canada not to take jobs—we came to Canada to create them. We are now hiring tens of people—tens of people, Madam Chair—in distribution, development, production and many other departments and specialties.

We are so honoured at the same time to launch our Peace on Earth Society, where we donate proceeds to the Canadian Mental Health Association, indigenous communities and many other organizations whose work is very well rooted in our society. The people of Antigonish have done an amazing job and have been a great support to us.

The examples of rural municipalities doing amazing work to support newcomers are countless. For example, we did not know how to apply to governments or start our business or network with neighbouring provinces, but everyone helped us to succeed much faster.

While I'm really honoured to share our successful and amazing journey with you, it's so important to mention that no one is born to emigrate. We are all born to live in our homeland, but after losing everything to the war in Syria, our family had refugee status for a few years and realized that Canada is the land of freedom, human rights and opportunity. In her communities, immigrants find opportunities for a better life, no matter how big or small the place they live in, and they can help build our communities together.

The most noble values for each newcomer I meet are peace and kindness. We suffered violence, persecution and devastating circumstances until we reached this country. It was not an easy journey. We lost everything, but we are here because we need peace, and peace is the main foundation for life for everybody. Without that, we have no work, we have no business, we have no school and we have no family.

In the end, Canadian communities continue to bring hope to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who come here looking to rebuild their lives with passion, peace, determination and persistence, and they give back immensely to make Canada the great country that it is today and every day.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Mr. Hadhad. It was great to hear from you.

We will now proceed to Mr. Joel Blit, who is appearing as an individual. He is a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo.

Welcome, Mr. Blit. Please proceed. You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Joel Blit, Professor of Economics, University of Waterloo, As an Individual]

Fantastic.

Thank you very much for inviting me to appear before this committee today. I am an immigrant, but today I'm appearing as an individual and, more importantly, as a professor of economics. I don't have any personal interest in the matter beyond trying to inform policy with the best available economic evidence.

Many of my comments today are echoed in the short but excellent IRPP article I have shared with you, called “How does increasing immigration affect the economy?” Before I can offer some thoughts on that question, we need to have a common understanding of what our objectives are as policy-makers and advisers. I would put forth that our goal needs to be, purely and simply, to make Canadians better off, and in particular to increase the standard of living of Canadians. If that's our goal, then the key metric has to be GDP per capita and not GDP itself. Canadians have a higher standard of living than the Chinese, for example, because we have a higher GDP per capita. This is perhaps an obvious point, but unfortunately it's one that is often forgotten in the debate.

Now, if we agree that GDP per capita is a key measure of the average economic welfare of Canadians, we can begin to discuss the economic impact of immigration. Let me start with the bad news and then move on to the good news.

The bad news, or the inconvenient truth, is that in Canada, immigration does not appear to have a positive impact on wages, employment or GDP per capita. Study after study by respected and credible academic economists has found either small positive impacts, small negative impacts or, most commonly, no impact at all. Therefore, the strong consensus among immigration economists, people like David Green, Craig Riddell, Mikal Skuterud, Arthur Sweetman and Chris Worswick, among others, is that immigration fundamentally has little to no impact on the economy. This, of course, is in sharp contrast to the narrative that we often hear.

This bad news means two things. First, in Canada immigration does not seem to be a viable way to grow GDP per capita. Second, pro-immigration arguments should be based on factors other than economics.

That brings me to the good news. The good news is that the same studies do not generally find a negative impact of immigration on the economy. That is good news because it's incredibly freeing. It means that we can advocate for immigration based on arguments around human rights or diversity. We don't really have to worry about the potential impacts on the economy.

One important caveat to this point is that existing studies for historical immigration levels are at 0.8% to 1.0% of the population. At higher levels, you might worry about our labour market's ability to absorb more workers, or that we might no longer be admitting the best and brightest. Four years ago, my colleague Mikal Skuterud and I were discussing these uncomfortable facts. We thought maybe previous immigration studies were measuring the wrong thing. Perhaps immigration was having a positive impact on other things, such as innovation. With Ph.D. student Jue Zhang, we spent more than a year collecting and analyzing data. To our surprise, the result was the same. Skilled immigrants to Canada, even those educated in STEM disciplines, seem to have no impact on innovation.

This, I want to point out, is contrary to much of the evidence for the U.S., and highlights the need to inform policy with Canadian and not U.S. or European studies. One of the reasons for the difference, we suspect, is that in Canada, only one in three STEM-educated immigrants were working in STEM, as compared with two out of five Canadian-born and fully one half of U.S. STEM-educated immigrants. In Canada the immigrant engineer driving a taxi is not a cliché. It is a fact. We also, as an aside, found that Canadian-educated immigrants tended to do better than foreign-educated ones, suggesting an avenue for improving outcomes.

Given your particular interest in the impacts of immigration on rural communities, let me end with a few comments in this regard. First, more research is needed on this question. What we do know is that the large majority of immigrants tend to settle in the larger cities. For immigration to have significant impact on rural communities, we would need, A, a way to get immigrants to settle there; B, that they stay in those communities; and C, that they buck the larger pattern of immigration having little to no impact on the economy. Personally, I'm not overly optimistic. In our study that I mentioned earlier, we had 98 Canadian cities, including many smaller ones. We did not see a significant difference between the impacts on smaller and larger cities.

In conclusion, I want to see open and honest dialogue around immigration. Evidence provides a shared basis for open discussion. I hope I have managed to offer a very high-level view of the evidence-based consensus shared among Canadian immigration economists—that is, that immigration has little to no impact on our economy.

Thank you. I would be happy to take any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Mr. Blit, for your opening remarks.

With this, the testimony by the witnesses comes to an end. Because of the disruption from the votes and the delayed start, we will do one round of questioning of six minutes each.

We will start with Mr. Hallan.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to all of our very, very patient witnesses.

I would like to start with Mr. Evereklian.

I want to acknowledge and thank you for your service. I thought I heard you say that you served as chief of staff to two ministers, which I think that's amazing.

I really like the idea that you proposed. I have seen this immigrant entrepreneurship program for people to take over businesses. In the home-building industry where the people wanted to retire, their kids didn't want to take over the business, so they were kind of stuck. Some of these businesses were doing well.

I've also noticed that when immigrants come, they may come here with newer ideas, better ideas on how to improve the businesses and create more jobs. I really appreciate that proposal that you put forward .

My first question to you is, why should this new program be implemented? What is the difference between what we already have now and what you're proposing?

[Agop Evereklian]

Thank you for the question.

There's a question that we all are familiar with, and that's the aging of our population. This situation is no different within the business community. A recent study demonstrated that out of 200,000 entrepreneurs, almost a third of them are over 55 years of age. They are already planning, if not already in the process, to transfer their businesses—all categories included.

Why is this? It's very simple. Previously in Canada, we had investor programs. These programs mainly gave opportunities to foreign nationals to invest in Canada for a number of years, and then at the end of the five-year period pick up their investment alongside their returns, and, as a token of appreciation, a Canadian passport. Then, they would leave.

What I'm proposing here, in all humbleness, is a program that will make sure that these new investor category immigrants will not come here just for the passport. They'll come here to settle and not only contribute from the day they come in, but also sustain and keep in place businesses, jobs, and moreover bring their know-how, knowledge and contribution to the regions.

The small and medium-sized business category is a very vibrant one. You all know that 80% of businesses are within that category. If we can come with a recommendation where we could give certain priority to this category of investor immigrants, not only would it help us to reshape the Canadian immigration policy and programs with this economic category, but also it will directly contribute to the regions.

Please let me say that when I propose this motion or idea, this project, it is not to the detriment of any of the other categories of our immigration policies. We need humanitarian, family reunion and refugee programs. This is in parallel to all of those existing programs. It is not to the detriment of existing programs. In reality, it is an addition.

I hope that my answer was clear, sir.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Thank you so much, Mr. Evereklian.

As a follow-up, I think this would address a very important concept, especially a problem in Alberta, and from what we're hearing, in other parts of the country, even in Ontario and Quebec, and that is, how do we retain people in rural areas? As you know, even when people are retiring, that's workforce that we're losing in the rural areas.

How do you see this program you're talking about being implemented, and how do you make sure that it serves a purpose successfully when it's implemented?

[Agop Evereklian]

Thank you for the supplementary question, Mr. Vice-Chair, Madam Chair.

What I'm proposing is actually not a new idea. This is a proven business model that has been working and functioning in Quebec since 2015.

It all depends on how we coordinate this operation. This is not simply issuing visas for immigrant entrepreneurs to come in and settle. There's an existing entity in Quebec, which was put in place by the Quebec government in 2015, and this organization is a non-profit organization called

CTEQ, which stands for Centre de transfert d'entreprise du Québec.

Basically what they do is business matchmaking. From the initial source country all the way to the destination of the rural region in Canada, in Quebec, what they do is actually identify the investor. They identify the company that needs to be transferred, and all along the course of the operation, they do coordination. The people are certified before they come. The matchmaking is done. The financial aspects.... Everything has been studied prior to their arrival. What we need is a similar entity in Canada.

There should be a “CTEC”, which would stand for Centre de transfert d'entreprise du Canada.

This could be done along the line with existing organizations like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, community shares and the BDC. We don't need to reinvent a new entity; we can integrate this successful business model into any existing federal organization.

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Thank you.

I don't know how much time I have, but I just—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Your time is up. Thank you, Mr. Hallan.

We will now proceed to Mr. Dhaliwal.

Mr. Dhaliwal, I know that you will be sharing your time with Mr. Regan. You can, please, go ahead.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Madam Chair, my question will be for Ms. Rooney and Ms. Wilkey.

Madam Chair, they mentioned this project that was introduced by the government: the rural and northern immigration pilot program that was launched on May 11 and is going to go until December 2022. I would like to hear how this program has benefited small towns like Nelson, Castlegar, and the surrounding areas and some of the particular industries or sectors that have benefited from this pilot project.

[Andrea Wilkey]

Sure. I can start us off, and then I'll pass it over to Erin.

The way I'd say it's benefited our communities is the fact that employers are able to open their doors because they have staff. That's been the challenge: lack of staff. It's also still early days for the pilot. We've provided a number of recommendations, but those are still being processed, so in some ways it's early days for us to provide specific outcomes from the pilot.

Erin, do you have anything to add?

[Erin Rooney]

Yes, I'd like to add that we've given 129 primary applicants permanent residency recommendations, and of those 129, I believe it's about 122 who already live and work in the region, so they've been here.... Actually, most of them came as students. They did a two year program at Selkirk. They're actually quite embedded in our region and our communities. They have communities and have developed a pretty strong intent to reside already. That's definitely benefited the employer and the employee because they've already been working for that employer and now they have this continuous process, that is, they have peace and security for why they will stay in the region.

We're very pleased with the outcome so far and so are the employers. Now, more and more employers, of course, are learning about the pilot and understanding what's available to them for recruitment and for retention.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Ms. Nord mentioned that most of the new immigrants are coming to six major cities. I would like to hear from you what additional measures can be implemented to increase the regionalization and efforts in attracting newcomers to cities like Trail, Castlegar and the surrounding areas.

[Leah Nord]

Is that addressed to me?

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Either Ms. Rooney or Ms. Wilkey can answer.