Broken Promise on Foreign Credentials Recognition

The Conservative government's growing list of broken election promises expanded today with the scrapping of its plan for a Canadian Agency for Assessment and Recognition of Foreign Credentials, Liberal Citizenship and Immigration Critic Omar Alghabra said today. "With today's announcement, the Conservative government has broken a key election promise to new Canadians, converting their proposed foreign credentials agency into a referral office that will do nothing more than refer new Canadians to the provincial offices that have always recognized foreign credentials," said Mr. Alghabra. "This referral office will only duplicate the work of the In-Canada Portal, which was established by the previous Liberal government," added Mr. Alghabra. During the 2006 Election, the Conservative government promised to "create an agency for the assessment and recognition of credentials, to provide pre-assessment of foreign credentials and experience," but over a year later have now decided to downgrade this agency to a referral office at Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

"Even worse, this announcement is geared only towards potential immigrants currently outside of Canada. It does absolutely nothing for the tens of thousands of people who have already made their way to Canada, many of whom are now citizens, who are trained but cannot get their credentials recognized," said Mr. Alghabra. Statistics Canada has recently confirmed that our labour and population growth will soon depend exclusively on immigration, so ensuring the successful integration of immigrants is essential for the future success of Canada. "The Conservatives lack of a real plan ignores one of the most important challenges our country will face in the coming years," said Mr. Alghabra. "Unless we can rationalize the process for recognizing foreign credentials for professions and skilled labour we run the risk of ongoing labour shortages in critical areas like healthcare and construction." In April 2005, the previous Liberal government announced a commitment of $263 million to launch the Internationally-Trained Workers Initiative, to improve the integration of immigrants and internationally-trained Canadians into the work force. This plan was an important step in tackling the foreign credential recognition challenge. "It is a shame that this narrow minded Conservative government does not understand the tremendous opportunity to the Canadian economy that addressing the foreign credentials recognition challenge presents," said Mr. Alghabra.