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Citizenship and Immigration committee Thank you. The interpreter has just taken my speech to make a copy of it, so I'll start without and, hopefully, fill in the blanks later if I leave things out. Thank you very much for allowing me the opportunity to speak with you today. I want to say that we appreciate the wor
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee I appreciate that. The appropriateness of imposing a quota system for family reunification is something that I and our members believe needs to be studied further. It seems to be inconsistent with the desire to increase humanitarian immigration and economic immigration. We have
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee In my experience, it doesn't prevent people from wanting to come to Canada. It just creates hardship, in terms of separation, for them once they are here. There are 13 settlement agencies across New Brunswick. They work with economic immigrants, family-class immigrants, and refug
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee Again, I would say it needs to be guided less on a predetermined number but more on how many eligible applicants we are seeing come through, and how we facilitate that. Especially given the 25,000 to 30,000 Syrian refugees we've recently welcomed, and the increased focus on now h
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee I think I would echo that question. The question this committee has to look at very seriously is whether a quota is an appropriate measure or a system to facilitate family-class immigration or family reunification. I don't believe it's consistent. It's arbitrary. It's an arbitrar
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee Yes, our organization would support opening up some options for sibling reunification and there was also some discussion about cut-off ages. In many cases the families are coming and somebody is going to be 18 years old and they're still a university student or college-age studen
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee In various sectors, certainly from my perspective, the best and brightest doesn't necessarily mean that they're the highest educated. In some cases it could be skilled tradespeople. Recently we've opened up streams in New Brunswick hoping to facilitate entry into more semi-skille
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee Yes, as well. We'd be in favour of a lock-in date, providing that there would be some planning around that and defining what the lock-in date is. We believe, and it's been raised in our organization several times, that not allowing dependents who are within one or two years of th
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee I'm working from research done by Professor Yoko Yoshida from Dalhousie University that indicates that the economic immigrants coming to New Brunswick report roughly 74% employment after year one and that family-class immigrants are on a par with the economic immigrants who come
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee When we looked at the percentage of overall immigrants coming to New Brunswick through the family-class streams, it was roughly 10% in 2014. Contrast that to 25% of overall immigration to Canada. Proportionally, a smaller percentage of our overall immigration in New Brunswick is
October 25th, 2016Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee members. As a relatively young New Brunswicker, this is an issue that is very important to me. I believe deeply in our region's capacity to turn our demographics around. We have proven our ability to innovate and think outside
June 14th, 2017Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee As I mentioned during my remarks, 1,700 jobs have been identified by employers who have completed expressions of interest in the pilot to date.
June 14th, 2017Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee Those are full-time jobs. They qualify under the pilot. That's within three months of that stream opening up. I think what we have here is a disconnect, in that certain sectors are having trouble finding workers in New Brunswick. Our chief economist in New Brunswick, David Ca
June 14th, 2017Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
Citizenship and Immigration committee As I explained, 1,700 jobs have been identified as unfilled—
June 14th, 2017Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc
June 14th, 2017Committee meeting
Alex LeBlanc