Canada’s scandal of squandered skills

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Jeffrey Simpson

There’s a paradox — no, make it the central paradox — of Canadian immigration: Immigrants have never been more skilled, but have never taken so long to achieve Canadian average incomes.

If an immigrant has less than high-school education, he or she has an unemployment rate of 12 per cent — about the Canadian average for that level of education. If the immigrant has one or more university degrees, however, his or her unemployment rate is about four times higher than the Canadian average for comparable training.  The more education, the deeper the so-called “transition penalty” for switching countries.

Canada is importing more poverty through immigration than ever before, according to Statistics Canada. The unemployment rate for immigrants iii 2001 was much higher than in 1981 — despite national unemployment being lower in 2001 than in 1981.

A whole bunch of things isn’t working with Canadian immigration: Among the most important is the transition penalty from arrival to jobs. But can we get our political leaders interested? Strippers and the problems of Immigration Minister Judy Sgro are more fascinating to opposition MPs.

Similarly, the Martin government’s “communities” agenda is all wrong, in part because it doesn’t focus on immigrants who are changing the face, texture and social cohesion of the major cities of Canada.

Immigrants are quite literally tomorrow’s Canada. Slightly more than 700,000 of them arrived in Canada in 2000-2002. Seventy-eight per cent of Ontario’s population growth from 1991 to 2001 came from immigration. Across Canada, 18 per cent of the total population consists of immigrants.

In the global world of tomorrow, the winning countries will be those that put their policies and money into human capital development. That’s why Canada should stop pouring money into its bottomless health-care system while its higher-education system remains underfinanced. That’s why the country needs not more dawdling treaty negotiations with aboriginals, but a domestic Marshall Plan to develop their skills in the modem economy.

That’s why businesses should be called on the carpet and asked why they do such a lousy job training employees. Let them improve their performance in this area, and then get corporate tax breaks.  That’s why the unemployment insurance plan should contain provisions for employees who have paid into the plan to take courses to upgrade or change skill sets.

This is tomorrow’s agenda, and immigration is central to it. The agenda is very, very far from the focus of the Martinites, let alone the apparently brain-dead Conservatives.

If Canada is to be among tomorrow’s winning countries, a cities agenda — not a diluted “communities” agenda — should be about human capital development, not handing over federal cash without accountability to mayors and municipal councils.

Ottawa brings in the immigrants, then dumps their problems on the cities and school boards. Those problems ought to be Ottawa’s urban focus.

For immigrants, and therefore for Canada, success means language training, credentials recognition or upgrading, and social-adaptation policies. It also means trying to encourage at least some immigrants to take their skills to locales other than Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal where 73 per cent of them settle.

Immigration’s problems are not the skill level of most of those who come (although a huge gap exists between the formal education of those who enter under the skilled-worker category and the entrants in the family class). A whopping 94 per cent of men and 90 per cent of women who arrive under the skilled-worker category have post-secondary education, compared to 44 per cent of women and 41 per cent of men in the family category.  Thirty-three per cent of male refugees and 29 per cent of female refugees have some postsecondary education.

Formal skills don’t necessarily translate into adequate literacy, since many immigrants who say they speak English or French still need help to improve.

Credentials recognition is complicated. Canadians need to know that foreign credentials are up to Canadian standards. That takes time, alas. We’re not doing immigrants or ourselves favours when, after six months in Canada, only 14 per cent of those with at least one foreign credential had had their credentials accepted, according to Statistics Canada.

The Canadian Labour and Business Centre said it well: “Canadians should be concerned about a deepening transition penalty because it constitutes an increasingly protracted underutilization of labour and skills.”

The country can’t afford this. Is anybody in authority listening?