Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Chair, and thank you, all, for the opportunity to make a few inputs today. I'm an immigrant employment specialist with the KEYS Job Centre in Kingston, Ontario. I have served as the national director for human rights and anti-racism for the Canadian Labour Congress f

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's a good point that you're bringing, Mr. Whelan. I don't know if I would limit it to just rural areas. Different parts of the country and different communities have different needs, so different allocations I think need to take into account those different realities. I've h

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are a couple of things. First, when we initiated this idea of tapping into the business knowledge that our highly skilled immigrants had, to be very frank, we brought them together because we saw how frustrated they were trying to get into their professions, because of the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the opportunity. With all respect, we can wait for the private sector, and we can go down a deregulated path in the hope that they will then create the jobs. We can also take a look at the track record that the private sector has had in following through with those

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the opportunity. Pre-arrival information services are huge. I deal with clients on a daily basis. There are currently over 600 clients on my load. Many of them are in the professional class or the semi-professional class. Most consistently we get folks not being aw

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for that opportunity, but before I do, Roxanne just reminded me that in our community, small things go a long way. The local community city councillor has a lawn sign that has a message on it, “No matter where you're from, we're glad you're our neighbour”. We're printin

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are ways and means to use the TFW program as the AIP is using it, to give a quick permit to employers who need somebody fast, so we're going to issue the work permit with the acknowledgement that within x amount of time the worker is going to move to a PR. That's an effecti

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Just before doing that, however, I didn't adequately answer your previous question on what else you could do. We've seen some modest changes on the express entry program, giving more points to international students, for example, to get the invitation for PR status. Similarly, pe

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure. I'll just repeat. We actually worked with the Queen's school of business to develop the approach, building on what's called the integrating immigrant cities charter that was started in Europe. Very simply, the way it works is it's a social procurement policy framework that