Good morning.
One of the dreams of parents who leave their native countries to come and settle in Canada is to educate their children. We agree to leave our jobs, our little luxuries. We sell our cars, abandon our homes in the hope of finding a well-paid job here that will enable us to raise our children. Even in our native countries, the children are cared for by the school and by the parents who play a partnership role.
We arrive here, and the children go to school and go through a quick integration period. The parents arrive at home and their dreams are broken because they can't find a job quickly. They stay at home and wash the dishes, do the cooking and do the cleaning. The luckiest ones find odd jobs working up to 70 hours a week. Consequently, they are unable to supervise their children or follow what goes on in Canada.
Parents left to their own devices often go to community ghettos. They stay cloistered there poisoning each other's minds. They hear that, if they want to work, they should quickly accept a position as an attendant at a hospital, do this or that. Most people who come here of their own free will often arrive with very high-level diplomas, but they are unable to integrate because everything is barricaded. Barriers prevent us from gaining access to employment. Worse than that, we don't even have the information that would allow us to fight. Some parents say they're denied jobs because they aren't Canadians.
Integration training is provided at well-equipped places like the Cité collégiale. That's where I was first accepted after trying everything else. I saw that, in fact, I was lacking information that would enable me to be curious, to love Canada, to explore it, to go further and to fight like all other Canadians to find a job.
So there is the fact of arriving here and not finding these integration training structures. There's a kind of withdrawal, a lack or loss of self-confidence. We tend to forget everything we know. Our skills become obsolete because we feel they won't serve a purpose in Canada, that's not where the country is, since our friends who arrived a few years before we did still have little subsistence jobs.
People get to that point. If a person was a doctor and is doing these kinds of odd jobs, what more can I do, with only a master's degree in economics, than what he's doing? It's better to follow your own path. Destiny is determined by the way we do things because we aren't in touch with the country. We don't even follow current affairs. We don't know what is being done. We don't know Canada and its policies. We don't know the geographic dimensions, or a lot of other things. We aren't even familiar with the cultural realities.
If we want parents to integrate well, there has to be an introduction to all the ways of doing things so that their curiosity is focused on the country and its specific characteristics. This aspect is very much lacking. I'm really the result of it because I succeeded by taking well-organized integration courses that made me love Canada, without making me forget part of what I am. That's often what's lacking because they say that's how it is in Canada; you have to go about it like that. So often people feel they'll never be able to do it.
We're telling you our skills are transferable. It's this gentleness, this way of taking us from our world to the other world that makes us love Canada. My recommendation is to say how to organize integration for parents in order to assist them in orienting themselves and in finding out, with their skills, how to integrate into the various professions in Canada. Our children, who are luckier than we are, enter school structures. They integrate quickly. They are real time travel machines.
There's an enormous gap between parents, who have become illiterate because they no longer follow current events, and their children. Their children dangle a lot of aspects in front of them, in particular the fact that we have the freedom to do this or that. They tell their fathers that they're worthless because they are no longer even able to buy a gift, whereas the other children have this or that thing. A parent becomes paralyzed and wonders whether it wouldn't be better to go back and start over.
Frankly, if people don't turn this corner, they fall into poverty. We aren't beggars. Were not looking for charity. When you organize humanitarian services, for example, we're ashamed to make use of them because we have skills that enable us to work. There's a lack of openness in the job market, but we are't prepared to attack that job market.
I'm only asking one thing: that parents be prepared to attack the job market in Canada because this is the country we've chosen.
Thank you.