Thank you very much for both your very thoughtful opening remarks, and also your challenging question.
As I listened to you I thought of some of our other participants who have had similar kinds of emotional discussions and who have also been very helpful to us.
Before I answer your question I'd like to say one thing. A person from South Africa who is an international sensation, at least in Africa, has said she came to Pearson airport and couldn't understand why there weren't people with signs saying, “Welcome to Canada.“ She was a TV personality and she found it very hard to go from being a TV personality to someone whose talents were not recognized. I think we have, to some extent, a little bit of the same lived experience, but in my case indirectly.
To respond to your question, one of the challenges that I would note—and again I'm not as clear on the jurisdictions that would be appropriate—is that our different levels of government clearly need to make it much easier for internationally educated professionals to become fast-tracked more quickly into being able to practise their profession.
We had one student who was a dentist from Lebanon. He was working as a security guard. He was one of two people, I think, who were successful in writing whatever the exams were to be able to go back to dental school. His experience was clearly not atypical. Whatever we can do to both assess the talents and credentials and fast-tracking internationally educated professionals, be they doctors, dentists, lawyers, and so on, is critical in making sure that we have the basic systems in place so that not every application is a one-off.
Clearly we can reasonably standardize what X kind of doctor should be able to do. By standardize I don't mean standardize the work, but to be able to say, “Okay, here is our checklist of the necessary skills and talents that X kind of doctor needs“ and whether you're from X jurisdiction or Y, either you have it or you don't. I think that kind of ability to fast-track by using processes and working with universities to create opportunities.... Our particular program is basically focused on what people in the system are calling the “soft skills”, which I call the “hard skills” because they're hard to do.
As for working with professional faculties, I think we have a great opportunity to say, “Here, we have talented people who want to work and we need doctors in particular.“
That would be my recommendation to develop a standardized process that's based on research of the talents and skills that professionals from other jurisdictions already have.