Speaking Notes

The Honourable Joe Volpe, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, at the National Manufacturing 20/20 Summit

Chateau Laurier Hotel, Ottawa, Ontario, February 8, 2005

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Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. Ladies and gentlemen, you have been very kind to invite me to exchange a few words and thoughts with you. It is an important gathering of the kind of people that the government of Canada needs to constantly build relationships and partnerships with. I say that to give you an indication of the transformative natures of the relationships between government and business, between government and people, between government and its citizenry.

Thank you for pointing to our little banter about China, but just to give you an illustration of how quickly things move for us, I point out, that in 1994, I was witness to what seemed to be a very small, insignificant decision on the part of the Chinese authorities in the mainland, but think of the consequences. What the Chinese did in 1994 was make it okay to leave the towns and village without an exit visa — introducing internal mobility. Maybe that should be the theme we ought to consider today, mobility.

By the end of December of that year, 92 million people left, moved somewhere else within the country. 92 million. Three times the population of Canada. Within one year, the Chinese were faced with the challenge of integrating 92 million different people in a different environment.

Anybody who knows anything about Chinese will know that the very first thing you have to understand is there is no such thing as a homogenous Chinese, everyone with a different culture, a different background, almost a different language, certainly a different dialect. Now, imagine the challenge of integrating them into a new environment.

In one city, a small city that I happen to visit, a city that grew from a village of 15,000 to seven million over the space of 15 years, just imagine what it requires because here you are all, all of you, exporters, manufacturers, entrepreneurs, men and women of business, maybe bottom line-oriented, but certainly process-driven, goal-attracted.

If you had to accommodate those people in your place, what kind of energies, what kind of entrepreneurship had to be unleashed? If you were to accommodate the people coming into your town at the rate which they were approaching, just work backwards, and you built a thirty-storey building, accommodating maybe 1,000 people per building. How many of those buildings would have to go up on a daily basis to accommodate the people that were coming to your town? If you built one per day every day of the week, you would only accommodate 365,000.

Now if you are in the business of making windows, doors, flooring, any kind of furnishing, what kind of economic activity would you have to put in place to meet the frenetic demand of such movement? What are the challenges for government? Challenges for government of course are investing in those people, ensuring that they become integrated into that new economy because most of these people would have been small farmers.

What about us? Think about the challenges that we have, all of you who suffer from a dearth of skilled labor today. There isn’t a person in this room, not a business represented by any of you, who doesn’t feel the need to have qualified people. Just a few short weeks ago, I was minister of Human Resources and Skills Development. Everywhere I went, employers wanted an opportunity to work with people to develop the skill sets required by each and every one of your industries.

Think for a moment about what is happening to our Canadian economy, thanks in large measure to your initiative. No, let me rephrase — thanks completely to your initiative and, perhaps, to wise government response to your initiatives, but think about it for a moment. What kind of environment are we living in today? Economists will tell you, if you have about 5.5% unemployment, you are doing really well. You are pretty close to full employment. In the early 1990s, we went through a little bit of a crash, but if you take a look today, the province of Ontario, the unemployment rate, lower than 6.8. Go over to Manitoba, 6.5. Go to Saskatchewan, lower than that. If any of you are from Alberta, and somebody tells you your employment is at 4.5, you will probably say, “I didn’t find any unemployed people.”

The highest participation in the western world in the economy is in Alberta. Aboriginal community members are participating, males at 74.3%, females at 73%. Can you imagine that? Non-aboriginal populations are participating at less than that, but over 70%. So every person between the ages of 15 and 64 that is capable of working is practically in the workforce. So we not only need skilled labourers, we need labourers.

If you go, and let me finish the story, you go to British Columbia, it has had some rough few years. Its unemployment rate is below 7%. Let me go to the other side of the country. If any of you are from New Brunswick and you come from the three major municipalities, you are looking for people. You are looking for skilled workers, you are looking for people to sustain the economy that is starting to rev up. If you are from Nova Scotia, the same thing.

Newfoundland, in Newfoundland, people will still talk about high unemployment but they talk about high unemployment in the small communities that are coastal. They don’t talk about that in the Avalon peninsula. Everywhere in the country, the big challenge is — the big challenge is skilled labor, labor capable of beginning to develop and economy that is local and national and yes, international. 45¢ out of every dollar earned in this country comes from international trade.

So, we are not a local economy anymore. At the same time, everyone of our communities, everyone of our provinces is looking to maintain a critical mass of people that will provide the standard and quality of life that we all have begun to take for granted. Thank God for that, because it means governments in the past have been able to individualize that which makes a community grow, that which makes a society prosper and that which makes a community develop a culture.

To do that, we need people. We need skilled people. We need people who would take a challenge that is resident in other people in other people in the community, in an industry, in an economic vacuum and say we want to fill that. A short while ago, the country of Canada said our immigration policy was, we want the brightest and the best because that is all we want to produce, the brightest and the best.

Our immigration policy was designed to bring people over who would add the kinds of skills that we as a country were still unable to develop at the rate that we felt necessary. Without going into the way that we attract people, think, if you are from Toronto or any of the major cities today, we probably have the highest, the best-educated taxi and limousine fleet in the entire world.

I was at a conference two weeks ago. I had been invited as Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development and ended up accepting as Minister of Immigration. The issues didn’t change. The guest speaker talked about, just hold on to your tables, talked about 70,000 engineers introduced into the Greater Toronto Area in the last five years. I will bet you, and if I ask you or ask anybody else in this room what is the key ingredient, the educational ingredient and human resources skill that will contribute to productivity and competitiveness? It is a staff of engineers. 70,000 of them driving cabs. You have all of these — just in Toronto, 70,000, that is 14,000 per year over a five-year period. We don’t graduate that many from our universities.

I was going from the Kelowna airport to the conference centre, and a chemical engineer and his wife were sharing duties in a cab. She too was a chemical engineer. I said, “What do you mean? Why can’t you find a job?” He said, “I’m making more money doing this.”

So we went on a recruiting binge for the best and the brightest to come here. They have medical degrees, engineering degrees, architectural degrees, diplomas coming out of their ears and guess what? They don’t have Canadian experience, the stuff that you want. So the buildings they build, the roads they construct, the bridges they design, the people whose help they maintain some place else, that doesn’t count.

I come from a university — my dad forced me to go — I come from a university that is the only one in Toronto. There is only one university in Toronto. David, you want to know which one that is? You want to know? There is only one. It is the University of Toronto and if you think that there are two other universities, one of them that has got 70,000 students per day and another one hosts some 30,000, one is called York and the other one is called Ryerson, don’t believe me. Just go and check their admission policy. None of the courses in the first year at either one of those other two schools are accepted at the University of Toronto. They just aren’t because there is only one university. I’m being a little facetious, I shouldn’t be. But if you can’t transfer credentials here domestically, how can you accept them from the University of Beijing? You know, they are only putting up three of those buildings that I talked about a moment ago that is still standing.

So you know, the big challenge that we have is to begin to think in terms of collectively, cooperatively doing something about foreign credential recognition. We can’t do it as a government, you know, crack a whip and say, “Do this.” Universities have to be involved, the licensing bodies, the professional associations, the employers, they all have to be a part of this. We have a vast reservoir of people that we have invited in this county in the course of the last ten years, that are there earning a living, doing well, but are being under-utilized and in an economic environment that says we need to have full utilization in order to be productive and competitive, what are we doing?

And those same people have a network that stands the globe. If we could just bring them into our own economic environment, given them the opportunity to practice the trade, the skills for which they have been trained, look at how much better we would be.

I want to give you the flip side of that. While we were going out, securing the best and the brightest and not making the connection with the universities, the licensing bodies, the provinces, the 450 institutions and jurisdictions that have to be involved in solving this problem, we made it virtually impossible for those of you who are involved in a much more manual, hands-on west end type of construction work, manufacturing, service delivery, to get workers. We did and so what happened? You became inventive.

I don’t want to pass judgment, but there is — the lexicon of the industries goes from “informal, undocumented, illegal” to describe the workers that are working in your businesses because you need them desperately and we didn’t bring them over, unless they came on a temporary workers’ visa. So, the economy absorbed about 120,000 of those every year, because we need them. We need them desperately, we bring them over and because we don’t bring over enough, a lot of industries, especially in the Vancouver area, British Columbia lower mainland and that corridor between Calgary and Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, need I say anything about the golden horseshoe? Even Montreal, I said something about St-John’s and Halifax a few minutes ago, there are these “undocumented workers”.

Here I am, I’m just getting briefed in my own department. I said the issues haven’t really changed. Just the rules and the regulations as they apply to our connection changed. The numbers, I asked, “How many undocumented workers?” How can you know how many are undocumented?

They say, “Well, you know, minister, the numbers range from 10,000 to 100,000.” I said, “Well, that is even sillier than my question, how do you know how many and why would we have such a range?” I can tell you how many. All you have to do is ask the unions in the Greater Toronto “How many people are on their books and shouldn’t be there?”. So I took a look at a report and they documented all the workers that are undocumented because it was an informal investigation. So the police don’t have it yet. The enforcement agencies don’t have it.

Imagine though a range of 10,000 to 100,000 people working in our economy because we need them desperately. But the numbers other people give me are higher. They range from 200,000 to 500,000. There are not that many, but I will tell you something. There is no shortage of people, and your colleagues, industries everywhere around the country, that are coming both to the Human Resources and Skills Development minister and the minister of immigration look for job validations and temporary work visas because they are economies that just can’t function.

I gave you the ones out west and I gave you some of the ones out east, just in a macrosense, they cannot function unless you and we build a good partnership that allows us to generate and regenerate an economy based on a skilled labour, on a timely labour application with credentials that are recognized by everybody everywhere around the country. Remember, I said a word about mobility. Well, mobility of today is skill. The mobility of today is predicated by education and the mobility of today is determined by your willingness to accept somebody else’s entrepreneurship as part of the productive, competitive mechanisms that you have put in place to be a thriving business, not only nationally but internationally.

We are up to the challenge. We hope you will be and that you will join us in that partnership.

Merci, mesdames et messieurs and thank you very much for listening.