Thank you, Roukya.
My name is Daniel Sigouin and I am the director general of Réseau de développement économique et d'employabilité Ontario. Clearly, our network is a member of RDEE Canada.
RDEE Ontario promotes economic development and employability in order to ensure the vitality and sustainability of all francophone communities in Ontario.
Since 2001, RDEE Ontario has developed expertise in several niche markets, such as the expansion of small and medium-sized businesses, research and analysis, financing, consultation, economic immigration, business alliances, the development of organizational capacity, the organization of trade missions and the establishment of communication strategies and partnerships in our official language communities.
In 2010, we launched a program called “La Bonne affaire”, a program geared toward economic immigration. La Bonne affaire is a provincial awareness and economic-integration program funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. La Bonne affaire works to make Ontario employers aware of the benefits of hiring newcomers, and supports employers in identifying talent and recruiting and integrating newcomers in the workplace.
La Bonne affaire also informs, trains and prepares newcomers for the realities of the Ontario labour market, so that they can meet employers' requirements. It is important to know what employers want to be able to train newcomers and prepare them for the labour market.
We share most of the challenges faced by RDEE Canada and its members. We also feel that the reform of Canada's immigration system will have an overall positive effect on Canada’s francophone communities, as long as we can make the system work properly. The system has shifted from proposing Canada as a destination for immigrants to inviting immigrants to come to Canada to contribute to Canada's economy.
We would like to stress that temporary foreign workers represent a significant pool for Ontario's economy. Two-thirds of economic immigrants are already in Canada, representing an important and significant pool of workers.
In Ontario, 49,770 positions were subject to labour market impact assessments (LMIA) for temporary foreign workers in 2012. Of these positions, 42% were in Toronto and the rest were scattered across the province. Of the total number of positions subject to LMIAs, 58% were in businesses with one to 50 employees, so most of our clients. It is therefore important to properly identify those employers and educate them.
As I said earlier, RDEE Ontario also faces the challenges described by RDEE Canada with regard to the recruitment and employability of francophone immigrants. We would like to place particular emphasis on the following points.
We need to promote employer and business awareness of the potential of francophone immigration. It is important to talk to employers, to think and act like them and to have a solid understanding of their needs. We also need to support them in the recruitment process.
We need to mitigate the myths surrounding the recruitment of immigrant workers. Those myths relate to costs, commitment, the tedious process, and so on. Roukya talked about that earlier.
We must obtain the necessary support so that our network succeeds in developing the tools needed to help the government meet its targets—a win-win partnership with the government. It is important to bring together local and regional economic stakeholders to identify the needs of employers, especially in the targeted sectors. In order to convince entrepreneurs, we must act like them and think like them. We feel that the social approach alone is no longer a winning option and we need to adopt an economic development approach.
Our recommendations are complementary to those made by RDEE Canada. By 2020, Ontario will be facing a significant labour shortage. It is important to educate employers now about the possibility of hiring immigrant workers. The federal and provincial governments have set targets to increase the number of francophone immigrants. Now they must implement ways to achieve this goal by hiring employability, immigration and economic development experts. If RDEE Ontario is to improve and increase the pool of employers to whom it provides individualized support services, it will need additional resources to achieve its goals.
In 2014, with a team of fewer than 10 people—the equivalent of three and a half full-time employees-—we were able to educate approximately 350 employers who hired francophone immigrants in Ontario. Additional resources would make it possible to expand the team, broaden our scope and cover the entire province.
The other recommendation has to do with temporary workers. A pool of skilled temporary workers is currently available. Streamlining the administrative procedures for obtaining their permanent residency would make it possible to keep them in Canada. Since the cancellation of the francophone significant benefit program and the introduction of the express entry program, many immigrants have had to leave the country. We have seen this on the ground. Unfortunately, few employers are taking the necessary steps because they are unsure about the LMIA application process and are afraid they will be turned down.