After Russian President Vladmir Putin declared war on Ukraine, Alex Mokretskyi fled kyiv with his wife, young son, and mother-in-law.
Mokretskyi is one of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who were granted three-year work permits under a special federal immigration program to help them wait out the war. Although Ukrainians are fleeing the conflict, they are not considered refugees.
Since arriving in Ottawa, Mokretskyi has struggled to support his family. He and his wife, Maryna, are trained lawyers, but his skills did not translate into equivalent jobs in Canada. The first job he found was as a dishwasher working 14 hours a day.
Mokretskyi now delivers food to Union Mission shelters and works as a cook at Eggspectations. Even with two jobs, she finds it difficult to make ends meet. Most of her salary is consumed by rent, which costs her $2,500 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.
“I have two jobs, now I’m trying to find more work. I don’t have days off. But I know it’s not just for me,” Mokretskyi said as he loaded a van for a food delivery. “It’s for my family, for my future.”
Alex Mokretskyi, 34, is a temporary resident of Ukraine. He has a special three-year work visa in Canada while he and his family wait out Putin’s war against Ukraine. (Judy Trinh, CTV News)
Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Canada will receive about “300,000 arrivals of Ukrainians” by the end of March under the special visa program. That’s almost 12 per cent of the 2.5 million temporary residents currently in Canada. Some may not have been able to find housing or work.
Last week, Miller announced new goals for temporary residents. By 2027, the federal government wants to reduce the number of people working, studying and living temporarily in Canada to five per cent of the total population, down from more than six per cent. Each province will have different quotas that still need to be negotiated.
At that news conference, Miller also acknowledged the strain that record levels of global migration were putting on Canada’s housing, health and social welfare system.
Miller said “Canadians should be unabashedly proud” of Ukraine’s commitment, but also said the milestone should also spur an “honest conversation about what this increase in international migration means for Canada as we plan for the future.”
In addition to helping Ukrainians, Canada is also seeing record levels of people seeking asylum, particularly from Latin America.
Figures provided to CTV News by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) show the number of refugee claimants has more than doubled in one year.
According to the IRB, 70,223 people made Refugee applications in 2022.
In 2023, the IRB received more than 156,000 complaints.
That’s a total of 226,255 refugee claimants compared to 300,000 temporary Ukrainian residents in roughly the same period.
But processing asylum claims can take years.
Miller said “rapid and fair processing of asylum claims is critical to managing the volume of temporary residents.” To buy some time and catch up, Canada is slowing the flow of asylum seekers.
At the end of February, Canada again imposed visa requirements for Mexican nationals.
There were more than 28,000 people from Mexico who requested asylum last year, the highest number of any country. They accounted for almost 18 per cent of all asylum claims in Canada.
That pressure of global migration is acutely felt in the Ottawa Mission. The shelter offers emergency housing, meals and job training, as well as addiction and trauma counseling for homeless people.
Chief executive Peter Tilley says people seeking asylum “had nowhere to go and were told at the airport to go to the Mission”.
Tilley says refugees typically make up less than 10 percent of the shelter population, but that number increased to more than 70 percent last fall. Asylum seekers currently represent around 30 percent of the Mission’s clients.
“We are putting mats on the floor of the chapel room every night so there are full beds,” Tilley said, adding that Mission staff are not well equipped to help new arrivals navigate the immigration system. .
Tilley is calling on the federal government to create support centers for refugee seekers where they first land to provide settlement services, so they are not directed to local shelters that do not have the resources to help them.
“It is an excessive demand on our already overloaded Ottawa Mission system. What the federal government needs to do is come into play to give them the support they need,” Tilley said.
Alex Mokretskyi (right) poses for a photo with (center right to left) his wife Maryna, son Leo and mother-in-law Halyna. (Photo supplied)
In January, the federal government announced $362 million to help house refugees. The city of Toronto will receive 143 million dollarswhile the province of Quebec will receive 100 million dollars.
The rest of the money will be divided among other cities in Canada.
But refugees’ stay in shelters is also being prolonged by bureaucratic barriers that prevent them from getting a job and a stable income.
Asylum seekers can take months to get their work permit applications approved, unlike Ukrainians like Mokretskyi, who arrived on visas to work under the special program.
Mokretskyi received training through the Mission’s food service program, which helped him land his two current jobs: working in a restaurant kitchen and driving a catering truck. Tilley regrets not being able to provide the same training to all shelter clients who want it.
“Most refugees are forced. Newcomers, if given the opportunity, can be successful, but not with the numbers we have seen come through our doors.” Tilley said.
Another part of the federal strategy to limit temporary residents could prompt employers to hire more newly arrived workers more quickly.
The government wants companies to hire more people domestically, so it is reducing the number of foreign workers employers can hire outside of Canada. As of May, only 20 percent of a company’s staff can come from abroad, down from 30 percent.
Only the housing and healthcare sectors, which suffer considerable labor shortages, are exempt from the new limit.