C anada is seen as a land of opportunity – a peaceful place – where people from all over the world come to work and seek a better life. In 1967, Canada pioneered an immigration system that removed the possibility of discrimination in the selection process.
Before that, it helped to be white. More than three-quarters of the immigrants who reported coming to Canada before 1971 were from Europe. There was a wave of immigration mostly from countries such as England, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Then, with the 1967 change to a “points system,” Asians surpassed white Europeans, making Asia Canada’s most dominant source of immigrants.
The points system ignored race and country of origin. Instead, it awarded points for education, language skills in English and French, and work experience. Immigrants were assigned points on a 100-point scale. If they reached a certain level of points set by the government annually, they were allowed into the country.
There were no quotas or restrictions placed on the number of people who could immigrate, so long as successful immigrants passed the points test. It was a system that admitted applicants based on merit and accomplishments on a first-come, first-served basis.
Canada’s immigration system was considered so visionary that countries such as Australia and New Zealand adopted a similar approach, designed to bring in immigrants who “deserved” citizenship. But in the last two decades, the success of the program has been on the decline. Immigrants have had a harder time integrating into the job market.
An example of this is Angela Palma, 33, a landed immigrant from Italy. She came here in July 2013 after her Canadian husband sponsored her. At the time, she finished her master’s degree in medical biotechnology. But so far, she’s had no luck finding work in her field.
She never thought settling to Canada would be so difficult. She expected more job opportunities for professionals like herself.
“Not being able to work is very hard. I felt rejected by the country that was supposed to welcome me,” Angela Palma, 33, landed immigrant from Italy.
Her plans to start a family have been stalled because she hasn’t been able to find stability in her new country. One of the problems she faced was a long delay at Citizenship and Immigration Canada for the approval of her work permit.
But her biggest setback is that employers are not recognizing her qualifications. Now, she is legally able to work in Canada but finds herself in a catch-22.
She’s come to realize that finding work as an immigrant with no “Canadian experience” is extremely challenging. “There are a lot of barriers that I need to get around somehow. I do not have the contacts and I still need to network a lot,” she says.
While Palma is a sponsored immigrant, she still faces the same problems that other immigrants admitted through the points system faced – the lack of Canadian experience. That lack of experience is a barrier her and many immigrants face when trying to break into the Canadian job market.
Palma’s been volunteering in the field of social work to keep her mind busy. But even if she wanted to shift to a new career path, she doesn’t have the credentials to do so. After studying for seven years at a top university in Rome, she is now considering going back to school.
Palma is not the only immigrant facing this situation. The unemployment rate for immigrants is nearly 50 per cent higher than that of Canadian-born workers, according to Statistics Canada. Many newcomers face barriers once they arrive in Canada because employers do not recognize their education or their experience in another country. Many foreign doctors end up working as taxi drivers or as gas station attendants.
In response to this, the Conservative government has drastically changed the country’s immigration system in hopes of having the credentials of immigrants recognized before they arrive in the country. Ideally, this would address the challenges Palma and other immigrants faced when trying to find a job.
On Jan. 1, the government introduced Express Entry, a new immigration system that greatly increases the importance of job offers – in areas or sectors where there are labour shortages – for people applying for permanent residency.
The new system ranks applicants on a 1,200-point scale, with half the points awarded to those with a job offer or a nomination under one of Canada’s provincial immigration plans, which connect immigrants with provincial job vacancies.
Under the new two-step selection system, all applicants are first electronically filtered to enter a pool and then ranked against each other. Those with the highest number of points are then invited to apply for permanent residency, for which they have 60 days to submit a full application. The government vows that the application will be processed in six months or less.
“Having a job offer is worth as much as all of the other criteria put together. So, this puts much more emphasis on bringing people in who have been selected by employers,” says Madeleine Sumption, head of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University in England.
Those who are not invited to apply then wait in the pool from which the government and employers can pick and choose. While skilled immigrants are still evaluated on language skills, education and work experience, much less weight is given to these criteria. Instead, once applicants are in the pool, having a job offer allows them to jump the line for an invitation to permanent residency.
Although this new system makes sense economically – by bringing in immigrants that have jobs lined up for them – Canada as a refuge for a better life has changed. Now, immigrants are only valued if they can stimulate the economy. Instead of being admitted based on merit, Express Entry only admits those who have a job offer, re-introducing what some say is discrimination in the selection process and opening up the possibility of fake job offers.
For many immigrants, Canada offered a new home, a chance to start afresh and build a better life. But the Conservatives’ new emphasis on employers is diminishing Canada’s idealism of the past. Canada’s new dream immigrant is younger, more educated and, unlike immigrants coming in under the old system, has a job offer. The country has shifted away from basing admission on merit or “a chance for a better life,” to the idea that immigrants are only worthy of admission if they can contribute to the economy.
For these reasons, the old points system was more fair, predictable and transparent. It awarded points based on a clear set of criteria, on a first-come, first-served basis. If an applicant had enough points – evaluated on education, language skills and experience – then they deserved to come to Canada. Express Entry however, is not predictable or transparent. What really matters is getting that job offer. And handing over the decision to employers on who gets admitted to the country is extremely dangerous in terms of fraud.
Permanent residency in Canada is really sought after and applicants have now a better chance at persuading employers to create fake job offers. The Conservatives also have a record of not monitoring their immigration programs. Therefore the government’s decision to privatize immigration through Express Entry, may lead to higher immigration fraud.
Now, instead of being leader in immigration policy, Canada has become a follower. New Zealand and Australia also gave up on Canada’s old point system and started giving preferences to jobholders in 2003 and 2009.
The current government is also not as welcoming of immigrants as previous governments. Since the Conservatives came into power in 2006, immigration policy has evolved from one that benefits the immigrant to one that benefits the country economically. Permanent residency for refugees and family members is restricted, and citizenship is becoming harder to get and easier to lose. Children over the age of 18 can no longer come as a dependent family member and there are tougher rules for grandparents who want to join their families in Canada.
The Conservatives tightened admission of refugees on the grounds that too many were coming to Canada to seek medical care. The government cut back on health coverage for refugee claimants, so that they could only access care if they posed a public health risk. But the Federal Court rejected the spending cuts saying the changes were “cruel” and “outrage Canadian standards of decency.” The Conservatives are appealing that decision.
The Conservatives also fell behind on their commitment to take in 1,300 Syrian refugees in 2014. Although the government has promised to resettle 10,000 more Syrian refugees over the next three years, they’ve been criticized for leaving most of the sponsorship responsibilities to private groups.
The Conservatives have also been under fire for their lack of priority on the increasing backlog of spousal sponsorship applications, which has left thousands of foreign spouses living in Canada unable to work and without access to health care.
Canada has witnessed a real shift in immigration policy over the years. The opportunity to come to Canada for many has disappeared. But the old points system also had its flaws. Although immigrants were able to escape discrimination at the entry gates, they often faced it once inside the country.
The Conservatives tried to deal with this problem by introducing the Express Entry. In making the changes, the government is focusing on the economic benefit immigrants can bring to Canada rather than the well-being of immigrants themselves.
The changes are supposed to deal with the increasing unemployment and underemployment rates of immigrants. Like Angela Palma from Italy, for example. Theoretically speaking, if she were admitted through Express Entry, her skills and qualifications would be matched with the needs of employers. She is having difficulty finding a job because she lacks Canadian experience. Express Entry is intended to match the needs of employers to the skills immigrants have to offer. It requires that applicants prove in advance that their credentials are recognized in Canada and obliges employers to prove that no Canadian is fit to do the job.
While some have praised the changes, others point out that the new system is likely to result in more discrimination, abuse and fraud by employers. Many are concerned that the new system gives too much power to employers to make fake job offers to friends or extended family in order to get them into the country.
Turning over the decision to private citizens could also reintroduce discrimination in the selection process that Canada was previously praised for avoiding, says Jeffrey Reitz, who heads the immigration research at the University of Toronto.
Unlike the previous scheme, which was impartial about race and nationality, the new one makes it possible for employers to discriminate in ways that are hard to notice. A study by the University of Toronto found that employers in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver tend to prefer applicants with English sounding names than someone with an ethnic name, even if both candidates are equally qualified.
“Express Entry removes a great deal of predictability from the system,” says immigration lawyer Joel Sandaluk because there are no set criteria and it all depends on job offers.
The old system was valued because it was transparent and predictable, he added. Candidates could look at the point’s table and know exactly whether they qualified or not based on their credentials. If the points added up, then they were eligible for permanent residency. “The idea behind that was to make it so that there was less discrimination,” says Sandaluk.
“When you remove those sort of racial, cultural and religious preferences . . . you get a far more multicultural immigration process and a far more multicultural country.”
The new system will favour people who already have connections to the country, he added. “If you had had a similar system (in the past,) we probably wouldn’t have the multicultural society that we have now because of lot of the people who came in would not have had those connections back in the ‘60s, ‘70s and the early ‘80s,” says Sandaluk.
And a lot of what shaped Canada’s multiculturalism today is the immigration system. The old point system, that disregarded country of origin, had a profound impact on Canada in the last 50 years. “It kind of made a lot of multiculturalism possible.”
The “new” Canadians will be younger, better educated and have arranged employment. Canada’s immigration landscape is, indeed, changing quickly.