We need to harness our skilled workers if we are going to avoid a jobs crisis
Rupa Banerjee is the Canada Research Chair in economic inclusion, employment and entrepreneurship of Canadian immigrants.
C.Canada could be heading towards a demographic crisis. We are getting older. Our birth rates are too low (10.15 per 1,000 people in 2022) and are declining every year. We simply don’t have the taxpayer base to support our aging population or the workers to fill the gaps in the labor market. In March of last year, job openings rose to record levels, with more than one million open positions across the country. We need people, not just in technology and healthcare, but in the entire economy.
Fortunately, unlike countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which largely shut down its immigration systems during COVID and have not reopened them: Canada has done the oppositeite. We are now seeing more than 465,000 immigrants arriving in 2023, up from about 350,000 the year before the pandemic.
It’s great that the numbers are high, but the current system doesn’t adequately support people coming in, and we don’t prioritize the types of workers we need. How are we going to maintain our target immigration numbers and bring all these people into the job market? Canada urgently needs skilled workers: Hospitals have already resorted to closing their emergency rooms and there is a backlog in the construction industry. If we don’t get it right, we will see a long-term ripple effect on the health of our people and our economy.
Our two-step immigration system has not fixed the problem. Skilled migration in Canada used to be a one-step model: immigrants were assessed on a points system and then offered permanent residence before arrival. We now rely primarily on a multi-step process, in which most people come as international students or temporary foreign workers, and then have the opportunity to apply for permanent resident status after working or studying here for a period of time. .
The new system favors people in certain occupational fields, particularly technology and finance. If you need a license to work, as you do in healthcare and many of the skilled trades, it is much more difficult to get through the two-step system because it is difficult and often impossible to complete the licensing process from abroad.
Meanwhile, in any given month, we admit twice as many temporary workers into the country as permanent residents. Of those temporary workers, those in high-skill jobs have more paths to permanent residency than those here to do so-called “low-skill jobs”: in agriculture, the service sector, and even parts of the care sector. This huge growth in temporary workers may erode labor market conditions for Canadian workers. There is no incentive for employers to improve wages or training because they can simply turn to vulnerable temporary foreign workers. Temporary workers become just that: a temporary solution to our employment crisis.
One solution is more contributions from the provinces. For example, health care is a provincial mandate; could help give provinces control over immigration of health workers, rather than keeping it at the federal level. Immigration ministers from several provinces, including Saskatchewan, Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta, have called for greater autonomy over their respective systems. Their applications are being considered and a revised provincial plan should be approved next spring.
Provinces are also testing new and better ways to integrate skilled immigrants. One example is British Columbia’s Facilitating Access to Skilled Talent program, which was created to speed up the licensing process for skilled trades. It has been so successful (67 per cent of participants get jobs in four weeks) that the province has expanded it to immigrants with a background in IT, biotech and life sciences.
We have a massive backlog of immigration applications due to problems that were brewing long before the pandemic: understaffing, malfunctioning technology, and an opaque process, which means people waste time resubmitting documents because they made a mistake. the first time. . The federal government has promised to put more resources into processing applications this year. The consequences of not doing it right are dire.
—As he told Liza Agrba
This article appears in print in the December 2022 issue of maclean’s magazine. Buy the edition for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.
