Magic Bullet For Foreign Professionals?

foreign trained professionals Getting 
Pan Canadian standard

By William Doyle-Marshall

You can always tell when election is blowing in the wind. That’s the time when the governing parties remember it is promise making time. So they dust off old programmes and present them to you as something brand new.

   Over the past few months Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been announcing initiatives that he believes will attract voters to his party. We can go back to Whitby when he offered tax savings to a certain segment of the community. But critics wasted no time telling him and you that is a benefit mainly for the rich.

                                                         Pierre Poilievre  

   Quite recently Harper and his team have been pedaling politics of fear as they move on Parliament Hill with Bill C 51. This mammoth piece of legislation they say is necessary to protect Canadians from terrorist attacks. Last year’s unfortunate attack which left a soldier dead outside the House of Commons and another soldier dead in Quebec are being presented as acts that should scare the entire country. True we have learnt about home-grown terrorist but to the credit of our protective services participants in this practice usually get arrested and paraded into the courts. Earlier this week Pierre Poilievre, Minister of Employment and Social Development and Nick Noorani Chair of the Government-appointed panel on Employment Challenges for New Canadians presented the country with some recommendations that should solve the problems foreign trained professionals face as they attempt to settle in Canada. The panel recommends that government require that each regulated occupation develop a Pan Canadian standard and a single point of contact. Sounds great. But when will this truly happen countrywide? We are aware of the saying ‘change is a pretty slow process’.

    As Minister Poilievre praised the panel for its work, he made a major concession – he and his federal colleagues have no power to make the recommendations become a reality. “The reality is only provincial governments have the legal authority to require regulated occupations do anything,” the minister announced to the nation via a teleconference session in Ottawa. “These licensing bodies are provincially regulated. The federal government can’t force them to do anything,” he admitted.

   When Poilievre told journalists that his message was “provinces and only provinces have this legal power under the constitution.” In his attempt to urge provinces to use this power where gate keeping exists amongst professional bodies, it was a nice way of saying ‘do not depend on me. That is the domain of our provinces. “We know that when we work together with the provinces, under federal leadership we can achieve results,” Poilievre pronounced.
   Why the difficulty accepting the minister’s announcement at face value? The Conservatives took over the reign of government in 2006. At that time, by the minister’s own admission 62% of Canadian born employees were working in regulated professions for which they trained. But only 24% of foreign trained employees could say the same. One in four new Canadians were working in the field that they trained for in their country of origin. Why did the federal government under Stephen Harper’s leadership fail to do anything about the situation until last year?

   I am shocked and you too should be because the federal government waited until it received studies six years later from TD Bank showed that Canada would have 370,000 more jobs if immigrant workers were employed at the same level as non-immigrant workers. The Conference Board estimated around the same time that under-utilization of skills among new Canadians cost the economy four to six billion dollars. If the government was serious and truly concerned about the nation’s economy it would not have waited on the CIBC to report that if newcomers were working in the jobs for which they were trained they would earn $20 billion more in total right across the country. So with elections about six months away and government presents the nation with these promises, one must have doubts about the intention.

  Is this an election carrot that the Stephen Harper Government hopes will provide rich dividends at the polls in October? Here I am compelled to paraphrase the words of a popular Trinidad calypso “politicians don’t lie, they does just forget”. I hope you will not forget what political pandering looks like when canvassers come calling at your door.