Thank you.
Madam Chair, through you, I will raise two points related to that.
I think that when it comes to immigrant women and STEM, prearrival programs and government support of those programs are really underutilized. You want people to go through some of this credentialing work while they're in their home countries and they have a support network. When somebody lands here, a lot of the time they don't have family. They don't have social support, and then we're asking them to do extra work at extra cost to get to do the jobs that they're already qualified to do. That's an unfair deal.
The other thing that I will share is testimony that I heard from a woman who was a doctor. Her husband was a doctor. I met her in Moncton. She was from the Republic of Congo. Their applications said they were doctors and Canada said, “Yes, please come; we need doctors”.
They got settled in New Brunswick, which is an area where it was a priority to bring in health care workers. Neither the woman nor her husband could work as doctors because of the process. They were literally told by immigration settlement agencies that they were wasting their time trying to get credentialed here.