by Rudyard Griffiths (rudyard@dominion. ca) is the director of the Dominion Institute
It is the quintessential Toronto experience. You get into a taxi and in the space of a few minutes your conversation with the driver goes from talking about the weather to sharing your life stories. One cabbie I recently met immigrated to Canada a decade ago. He took up taxi driving because his engineering degree was not recognized by Canadian employers. He and his wife had three children in Canada, but she decided to return to India to live with their extended family. With a bullish real estate market and good job prospects in Mumbai, his home country of India was starting to look more like the land of opportunity and Canada a dead-end. My cab ride hit home for me the scale of the challenge we face in terms of attracting and retaining immigrants in a fast-changing global economy. Let's face it, Canadians have a mile-wide blind spot when it comes to how we think potential and new immigrants perceive our country. We assume the world is clamouring to come to Canada. Longer-settled Canadians are also quick to believe that our "First World" status gives us the pick of skilled foreign workers. We know there are problems with the accreditation of skills learned and practised in other countries, but we think that our much vaunted health-care system and multiculturalism make Canada an irresistibly attractive place to settle and raise a family.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Canada is the second choice for the majority of new immigrants. Of the 250,000 people who acquired Canadian citizenship last year, only a quarter were skilled or professional workers. Yes, everyone appreciates our health-care system and the diversity of our big cities; yet fully one in three immigrants eventually leaves. It's hardly surprising that we are doing a lousy job retaining immigrants when you consider that a third of new citizens don't speak French or English, yet only 20 per cent of federal spending on immigration goes toward language training. It also doesn't help that, while Ontario receives almost half of all newcomers,the province receives only $1,500 per immigrant versus more than $3,000 in Quebec. Behind these numbers lie the reality that the children of low-income immigrants aren't climbing up the economic ladder and, instead, find themselves stuck in the same dead-end jobs as their parents. Our collective failure to provide new citizens with opportunities to succeed needs to be set against the new global reality. We live in an era typified by cheap global communication and travel. New citizens, compared with previous waves of immigrants, use satellite television, cellphones and charter flights to maintain close, if not seamless, connection with family and friends in their country of origin. With one quarter of all immigrants to Canada hailing from China or India — two booming economies where property values are soaring and middle-class jobs are being created hand over fist — many new Canadians, such as the taxi driver I met, are questioning why they should stay when they can't use their hard-won skills. Why not return home and benefit from a fast-growing economy, extended family networks, and familiar culture and language?
The free flow of information in our globalizing world has also created a two-way conversation. Potential immigrants, especially those with strong technical skills, are learning from contacts in Canada just how dysfunctional our immigration system is and the real hardships they could face here. Considering that in five years all of Canada's net labour force growth will come from immigration, what can we do to improve the system? We have to understand, deep down, that getting our immigration policy right is as important to our country's long-term well-being as addressing global warming, fighting terrorism or sustaining publicly funded health care. To this end, we have to wake up from our narcissistic delusions about what Canada offers newcomers beyond multiculturalism. Immigrants have never had more choice as to where and how they live their lives. If we don't start building a settlement system that really works — the $307 million in new federal funding being a step in the right direction — immigrants will vote with their feet and trigger an exodus that Canada simply can't afford.
It is the quintessential Toronto experience. You get into a taxi and in the space of a few minutes your conversation with the driver goes from talking about the weather to sharing your life stories. One cabbie I recently met immigrated to Canada a decade ago. He took up taxi driving because his engineering degree was not recognized by Canadian employers. He and his wife had three children in Canada, but she decided to return to India to live with their extended family. With a bullish real estate market and good job prospects in Mumbai, his home country of India was starting to look more like the land of opportunity and Canada a dead-end. My cab ride hit home for me the scale of the challenge we face in terms of attracting and retaining immigrants in a fast-changing global economy. Let's face it, Canadians have a mile-wide blind spot when it comes to how we think potential and new immigrants perceive our country. We assume the world is clamouring to come to Canada. Longer-settled Canadians are also quick to believe that our "First World" status gives us the pick of skilled foreign workers. We know there are problems with the accreditation of skills learned and practised in other countries, but we think that our much vaunted health-care system and multiculturalism make Canada an irresistibly attractive place to settle and raise a family.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Canada is the second choice for the majority of new immigrants. Of the 250,000 people who acquired Canadian citizenship last year, only a quarter were skilled or professional workers. Yes, everyone appreciates our health-care system and the diversity of our big cities; yet fully one in three immigrants eventually leaves. It's hardly surprising that we are doing a lousy job retaining immigrants when you consider that a third of new citizens don't speak French or English, yet only 20 per cent of federal spending on immigration goes toward language training. It also doesn't help that, while Ontario receives almost half of all newcomers,the province receives only $1,500 per immigrant versus more than $3,000 in Quebec. Behind these numbers lie the reality that the children of low-income immigrants aren't climbing up the economic ladder and, instead, find themselves stuck in the same dead-end jobs as their parents. Our collective failure to provide new citizens with opportunities to succeed needs to be set against the new global reality. We live in an era typified by cheap global communication and travel. New citizens, compared with previous waves of immigrants, use satellite television, cellphones and charter flights to maintain close, if not seamless, connection with family and friends in their country of origin. With one quarter of all immigrants to Canada hailing from China or India — two booming economies where property values are soaring and middle-class jobs are being created hand over fist — many new Canadians, such as the taxi driver I met, are questioning why they should stay when they can't use their hard-won skills. Why not return home and benefit from a fast-growing economy, extended family networks, and familiar culture and language?
The free flow of information in our globalizing world has also created a two-way conversation. Potential immigrants, especially those with strong technical skills, are learning from contacts in Canada just how dysfunctional our immigration system is and the real hardships they could face here. Considering that in five years all of Canada's net labour force growth will come from immigration, what can we do to improve the system? We have to understand, deep down, that getting our immigration policy right is as important to our country's long-term well-being as addressing global warming, fighting terrorism or sustaining publicly funded health care. To this end, we have to wake up from our narcissistic delusions about what Canada offers newcomers beyond multiculturalism. Immigrants have never had more choice as to where and how they live their lives. If we don't start building a settlement system that really works — the $307 million in new federal funding being a step in the right direction — immigrants will vote with their feet and trigger an exodus that Canada simply can't afford.
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