Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you very much for having me. My name is Anna Triandafyllidou. I hold the Canada excellence research chair in migration and integration at Toronto Metropolitan University, and I myself am an immigrant to Canada.
I want to speak today less about our selection system in Canada and more about our talent utilization system.
Canada is the most educated country in the world, thanks to immigration. We are the country with the highest percentage of people who have college or university, or higher education, in the OECD, so I take it that it's probably the highest in the world. However, we know that immigrants are overqualified by 35%. They do a job that requires fewer qualifications than they have, compared with about 18% of Canadian-born people. It's double the rate.
Time and again, when we look at studies by colleagues and economists who crunch the numbers—I'm a sociologist, so I don't crunch the numbers that much—we see that the economic and social outcomes of new permanent residents improve through the years. The express entry system is proving to be working.
We know that, right now, immigrant men meet their Canadian-born peers four years after landing, in terms of employment rates and earning outcomes. Immigrant women improve, but they don't meet those of Canadian-born women. Even four or five years after landing, they remain penalized. However, when we look at college-educated men and women—this also holds for university-educated men and women—we see that immigrant men do less well than their Canadian-born peers. Even after five years, a 15% gap remains. Immigrant women who are college-educated start with a big gap at about 40% and never catch up with Canadian-born women.
Long story short, our system has improved. We're doing much better. We're bringing in people who are highly educated; they have talent and resources, and they help build our communities and our economy. However, we have a gender problem. Immigrant women are penalized, whether they're university-educated or college-educated, so we need to look at our population policy in terms of child care support, family support, and pre- and post-school-time support.
My second point is about broader skills underutilization. We have a bit of an AI power tool hype in human resources these days. Of course, in order to make up for their lack of familiarity with the system, newcomers to Canada use AI-powered tools to write résumés and prepare for interviews. Then our businesses use AI-powered tools to read those résumés and to longlist or shortlist candidates. It seems as though we're going full circle in our excitement over AI, but we have a problem recognizing skills and professional experience.
So far, our settlement services focus on the migrant. We tell the migrant, “You have to improve yourself. You have to learn better English or French. You have to acquire a Canadian credential. You have to acquire Canadian experience.” I want to say that we need to focus more on the system. What makes their skills and talent not visible? Part of the issue is with employers. We don't recognize the reality for employers. We heard about this in the previous panel. There are small employers and big employers. They have very different needs and capacities. There are employers in big cities like Toronto and the smaller places like Drummondville that we've heard about. We need to work with them more because, for them, hiring is risk management. They often don't go for the best person; they go for the least risky person. This is very important. We need our settlement services to work with employers and to put AI-powered tools to work for this purpose—to help us prove and move the skills and experience of our newcomers.
We know that more than 50% of new permanent residents were temporary residents in Canada and that those who had higher earnings before landing will do much better in the labour market. We need to work on job offers, internship offers and entrepreneurship opportunities. We have a silver tsunami on Canadian farms—we could have migrants buying those farms and investing in them.
I think we need to work more in this field as a priority for building a better and stronger Canada.
Thank you very much.