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NOTES FOR AN ADDRESS BY
JANICE CHARETTE
DEPUTY MINISTER OF CITIZENSHIP
AND IMMIGRATION

Eighth National Metropolis Conference

Vancouver, B.C.
March 26, 2006

Check against delivery

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Introduction

I want to thank the Minister for his remarks and welcome you to this plenary session on “Governance Approaches to Immigration and Integration.”

I am joined by four speakers who have some experience in the issues that draw us together:

• Maryse Alcindor, the Deputy Minister of Immigration and Cultural Communities for the province of Quebec;
• Tom Jensen, the Assistant Deputy Minister of Multiculturalism and Immigration for the province of British Columbia;
• Sam Sullivan, who is now very well known as “His Worship the Mayor of Vancouver” by the one billion people who saw him on TV during the Winter Olympics closing ceremonies in Torino!; and
• Elizabeth Mills, the Executive Director of the Office of Immigration for the province of Nova Scotia.

I want to thank our speakers for agreeing to be part of this session.

Let me begin with a few words by way of introduction.

Productivity and Competitiveness

While Canada’s economic outlook is currently positive, it’s no secret that we’ve lost some of our competitive advantage in the areas of innovation and productivity.

Just last year, the Conference Board of Canada put us at number 12 in world rankings of economic activity. We dropped nine places in two years. On a per capita basis, we’re behind smaller nations such as Denmark, Finland and Switzerland.

Countries around the world will increasingly look to immigration as the source of talent and innovation to help them generate wealth and prosperity.

Canada has an advantage because we recognized this some time ago and are well positioned to compete. But the need to improve productivity to secure and enhance our standard of living will take even more collective effort.

We are seeing more evidence of interest in concerted action among governments and involving the private sector, labour unions, service providers, and last but not least, the research and academic community.

Progress Through Collaboration

At the federal level alone, immigration has become a government-wide file involving many other departments that deal with both domestic and international issues.

I believe the same is true provincially, where immigration officials are engaged in a collective effort with other provincial departments as well as municipalities.

At the municipal level, many communities now have offices dedicated to attracting newcomers, and to settlement issues that bring together cooperating agencies, NGOs and service providers.

No Magic Formula

There is simply no magic formula to address the related issues of demographic change, productivity and skill shortages. As we consider the immigration element of that strategy, one of the pressing issues we must address together is the relative decline in outcomes for recent arrivals.

Troubling Outcomes

How can we hope to maintain our competitiveness when entry-level earnings for all categories of immigrants have declined? This holds true despite the fact that most newcomers today are better educated and have greater language skills than earlier generations of immigrants.

Research shows that at the beginning of the 1980s, 66 percent of skilled worker principal applicants earned more than the Canadian average income one year after their arrival.

That remained the case for only four percent of the same category of newcomers by 1996.

In addition, despite the fact that some data show the income of immigrants is increasing slightly (and particularly, the earnings of skilled workers), the average income of immigrants is still low, and too many live in poverty.

As you well know, studies confirm that Canada is not able to fully capitalize on the potential economic and productivity gains from immigration because many newcomers work in jobs that do not correspond to their level of education and to their professional training.

There is a debate on exactly how much human capital is lost. Whatever the actual figure may be, it is too high because more than actual dollars, it involves a loss to those who choose Canada as a destination to realize their objectives, and it is a loss to Canada’s productivity.

Not only do newcomers face underemployment, or even unemployment. Canada also faces a growing challenge of skill shortages in many regions and sectors.

One especially challenging issue is the evidence showing that Canada’s immigration program has not been successful in meeting the nation’s demands for skilled trades. And in many parts of the country, these are in very short supply.

So I think it fair to say that our immigration program is under stress. The need to explore new approaches offers the opportunity to come together with our stakeholders and other levels of government to work on these problems together.

Recent Developments

We have a good base and toolkit on which to build.

For example, we have a collaborative Temporary Foreign Worker Program involving federal and provincial departments, municipalities and employers, which brings in over 90,000 people each year. Bilateral agreements are currently in place with every province.

When the government signed the first-ever Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement last November, the need to bring municipalities to the table was explicitly reflected in the new governance approach.

Federal, provincial and territorial ministers have been meeting more frequently over the past few years. The most recent meeting saw the adoption of a common strategic direction which identifies shared priorities for a collective effort in this area.

Yet these are mostly predictable approaches based largely on previous models of intergovernmental cooperation.

We need more innovative strategies to advance mutual action. And we need approaches that reflect recent changes in our society.

For example, Canada is becoming a predominantly urban society. And immigration is largely focused in our cities and communities, where most people choose to live.

How should we bring municipalities to the immigration table, particularly with regard to meeting the settlement and integration needs of newcomers?

Conclusion

We have Mayor Sullivan here to keep us honest in this part of the discussion.

And we’ve brought this panel together as a whole to stimulate thinking on related opportunities for collaboration.

Those of us from government who are on this panel will be keenly interested in the views of our research colleagues as we open up for discussion.

So I would like to launch our deliberations by turning the podium over to our panelists.