Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think there needs to be a national vision of where it's headed. As Tim and another one of your colleagues rightly pointed out, with some of the regulated professions, there is a necessary provincial lead role because of the jurisdictional issues. But I think we set immigration

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think you'll hear better from the people who are actually running the program at the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, but what I know of the program is that it has had very early successes, good successes. More information before people come is incredibly important.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think it's going in absolutely the right direction. I think the work that it's doing overseas, as I just mentioned, is absolutely necessary. I also think the office is well-positioned to take on some of this national direction-setting. I think they could perhaps host a national

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure. I'll start and then I'll pass it over. With respect to the loans fund, I should begin by mentioning that TRIEC was started as a project of the Maytree Foundation, so there's a relationship between the two organizations. About five years ago we started the loan program, rec

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We've consulted to death with employers and small and medium-sized enterprises. Every time we've done a focus group, all they say is, “I don't want to do paperwork”. Their hands go up when they think about getting involved in a government program. It needs to be a quick return fo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think there could be. I think that could help. This is an area of experimentation. We need to try a few different things to see what works. For the last five years we have been trying to do a number of different things with small employers. A couple have worked; many have not.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, I think the intention is to take that away, so that the person screening the résumé or candidate is focused on the essential skills for the position.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  May I respond? I'd like to start with that one, because we have seen that in a smaller scale with the Royal Bank of Canada. Currently the chair of our council is Gord Nixon from RBC. A number of years ago, the Royal Bank experimented and removed the place of education from their

Citizenship and Immigration committee  How so?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not sure I'm creating categories of people. I think what we're doing is taking away the category and looking just at the skills. We're paring it down to the essential skills that you're looking for when you're doing the screen, unless I was misunderstanding--

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This is an idea that has been tossed around for a couple of years as an incentive, particularly to small and medium-sized business. This has come out of our experience with an internship program in Toronto called Career Bridge. It's a four- to twelve-month program. The employers

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, and good morning, honourable Chair and members. My name is Elizabeth McIsaac. I am the executive director of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council—for short, TRIEC, which is much simpler. TRIEC is a multi-stakeholder council bringing together employers, com