Canada has more immigration goals. Will we really do the work to meet them?

CLIP You’re listening to a frequency podcast network production in association with City News.

Jordan We love to think of Canada as a promised land for immigrants from all over the world. And we also love the fact that immigration makes us stronger. It is a really pretty picture and a really good story. So naturally, we’re leaning into it. The federal government is expanding Canada’s immigration targets, saying on Tuesday the country will bring in 500,000 permanent residents per year starting in 2025. But listen, as much as we love this image, it is not altruistic. Canada needs immigrants to survive more than almost any other country on Earth. We have both the political and popular will to sustain big immigration targets. And at least for now, Canada ranks among the very top destinations in the world for immigrants. All of that is a great place to be. Starting from here are the questions, though. What are we doing to make sure those immigrants will continue to want to come to Canada, to make sure they’ll succeed when they get here? To attract workers in sectors that we need the most? To make sure that the infrastructure that already struggles with Canada’s current population can accommodate another half million new Canadians? And do it well and do it again. Because if we can’t get those things right, the story that we love to tell ourselves might not have the happy ending we imagine. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story.

Rupa Banerjee Rupa Banerjee is the Canada Research Chair in Economic Inclusion, Employment and Entrepreneurship of Canada’s Immigrants. She’s also an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Hello, Rupa.

Rupa Banerjee Hi, Jordan. How are you doing?

Jordan I’m doing really well. Thanks for joining us today. No problem. This might seem like quite a broad question to start with, but how important is immigration to Canada’s continued success?

Rupa Banerjee In short, extremely important. So our birth rates are currently simply too low, and they’re declining every year. So right now, we’re actually below the no migration population replacement level, which means that without migration, we just wouldn’t be replacing our population. So that level is about 2.1 children per woman, and as of 2020, our birth rate is just around 1.4 children per woman. So this has a lot of negative impacts, as you can imagine. When you combine this with an aging population where we had the boomers, who are now getting up in years, we’re really reaching this kind of population crisis. And then you add to this the issue of job vacancies. So in March of last year, job vacancies rose to record levels with more than a million vacant positions across the country. And of course, the pandemic has exacerbated this enormously. So we need people. We need people across the economy, not just in technology and finance, but also in health care and construction and really across the economy. This might sound like a dumb question, but what happens if we don’t replace those people and those workers, like what literally happens to the country. So we simply won’t have the taxpayer base to sustain our pension system, our healthcare system, particularly with our aging population. Of course, these things are extremely important and we’ve really historically relied on a relatively young working population to be able to pay for these things. So according to the 24 incentives, the number of seniors 65 and older grew six times faster between 2016 and 2021, relative to children between zero and 14. And then a record number of these folks are planning to retire in the next few years. There’s going to be a huge burden on our Social Security net and without immigration, we just can’t sustain this. Moreover, without immigration, our economy will not grow. And so this is hugely detrimental impacts on our country as a whole.

Jordan One of the reasons it’s so interesting to talk about this right now is because of the climate around the world. Can you give us some context on Canada’s current immigration strategy in comparison to our traditional peer countries? UK, US, Australia, et cetera?

Rupa Banerjee Absolutely. So Canada is kind of seen as a leader in this area throughout the world. So right now, about one in four Canadians are not born in this country and this is the highest among all G seven countries. So we can compare that to the US, where it’s about 14% that are immigrants. Also in the UK, it’s around 14%. So we’re similar in terms of proportions and numbers to countries like Australia. So Australia is the only other country that can really be seen as historically similar to us. But since COVID we’ve really diverged from them as well and I can get into that in a moment, but in terms of our strategy, the other thing that’s really different about Canada is that we have taken a very primarily economic focus to our immigration policy. Whereas countries like the US have really had family reunification and humanitarian immigration as the main sources of their immigration. Canada has really focused since 1967 on economic streams.

Jordan So although we do have a refugee system, the focus of our immigration is really on bringing in, quote unquote, “the best and the brightest” to really try and strengthen our economy. Why don’t you elaborate on how that’s diverged since the Pandemic began?

Rupa Banerjee Yeah, absolutely. So, as I said, Canada was often compared to Australia in terms of its immigration strategy and also its targets. And until about 2020, we were quite similar when the Pandemic happened. Of course, with closed borders, all countries sort of ceased immigration for a period of time there. But as borders started opening up and the prospect of the post Pandemic recovery was really on the minds of policymakers, Canada took a very unique approach. So they’ve decided that immigration is going to be their biggest bet to try and help us recover post-Pandemic. Whereas a country like Australia has really taken a different approach. They’ve decided not to bolster their immigration numbers to anything higher than it was pre pandemic. So they’re planning to simply bring it up back to their pre pandemic levels, which was about 200 and 3240 thousand per year. And of course, as has been really widely publicized, we are now going to be bringing that up to 500,000 by 2025. So we’ve really taken a different slant compared to other countries when it comes to post pandemic recovery.

Jordan In a moment, I want to talk about the immigrant experience in Canada and what it is and I guess more importantly, what it isn’t. But first, in terms of these targets, how different is immigration as a political issue in Canada compared to some of the other countries that right now are seeing anti-immigrant right wing reactionary rhetoric, for lack of a better term. We had a guest on the show talking about conservative leader Pierre Polievre and his strategy to win the next election and he pointed out that even as he courts these kind of hard right, the folks that were on the Freedom Convoy, he also makes sure to mention that we need immigrants and praise immigration as part of Canada. And that’s very different from like, say, the Republican Party in the US.

Rupa Banerjee You’re right. Canada is the only country where every major political party, regardless of whether they’re in the left, right or center, is essentially pro-immigration. Now, their targets may vary to some extent, but essentially the framing of immigration is very similar in all of our major parties. This is, I would say, primarily because we have, over the past 50 years, really put into place a very tightly calibrated, tightly controlled immigration system in which we choose who arrives. And we really focus on a rhetoric which highlights the ways in which immigration benefits Canada and Canadians. Obviously, we’ve also benefited from geography, right? We’re not in a location where we get streams of boats or people crossing over the borders. And now over the past few years, we’ve seen small numbers actually coming through border locations like rocks and road. And that’s actually had led to a lot of people being very worried. So in many ways we’re very lucky in terms of where we are. And we have an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards immigration among the general population. So even with the steadily increasing immigration targets over the past few years, the public as a whole has never been more supportive of immigration than they are today.

Jordan So, so far all this is really positive. We need immigrants. They really want to come here, we have big targets for them and politically we seem to have the will. So what are we missing in all this? What’s the problem?

Rupa Banerjee Yeah, so the problem is that there’s really a disconnect between the rhetoric and what is really happening on the ground after immigrants actually arrive in Canada. So we know that although immigrants are highly educated and skilled. I mean, they’re four times more likely to have a university degree than Canadian born population. They tend to have enormous problems finding work in their field, getting licensed in their occupation, if they are in a regulated occupation, and generally face a lot of skilled evaluation. So I’ll give you an example. In the healthcare system, we hear all the time about all of the healthcare shortages, and yet 50% of health professionals with foreign credentials are working in a field outside of their skills. So there’s a real sense that from the immigrants perspective, they come with these big hopes and in many ways with that rhetoric that’s really out there globally with Canada being kind of a leader in selecting and integrating immigrants. And they find that the reality is quite different on the ground we hear about it about immigrants who apply for hundreds of jobs before they even get called back for an interview, despite the fact that they were essentially asked to come in and selected to come in. I mean, there’s the quintessential Canadian story, and probably many of the listeners have this, of being in a taxi cab in Toronto and starting up a conversation with your driver to find out they were a doctor back home. Yeah, absolutely. And especially with the growth of digital platforms like Uber and TaskRabbit as well. So the kind of a gig economy has been another big source of sort of precarious work that a lot of newcomers do end up taking, in addition to low skill service work. There’s a lot of reasons for that. There’s low kind of barriers to entry into a lot of those jobs. But on the other hand, they’re extremely precarious, don’t provide any employment protections, and in many ways leads to further deskilling because those folks aren’t able to really practice and augment the skills that they already brought with them. So they really have a gap in their resume for many years, which makes it really hard for them to then reenter into their field. And I know in healthcare, at least because we’ve done episodes on this, that this is changing a little bit. Right. Especially with the current crisis, governments around the country are opening up the certification process to try to get those foreign credentialed workers into the system faster.

Jordan But in general, I guess my question is, what do the immigrants that we bring to Canada currently need when they get here in terms of support? And what do they need that they aren’t getting?

Rupa Banerjee So you’re right. The Canadian government, immigration, refugee citizenship, they’re very aware of these issues that we are talking about today. Of course. Right. So the funding of settlement services exists. There are lots of settlement services that do exist out there. There’s a real effort to focus, for example, now on pre arrival settlement services. So really trying to get folks ready before they even land in Canada. However, this is quite haphazard at the moment, I would say so. I did recently a study where I interviewed newcomers who had pre arrival settlement services and the kinds of services they got and the depths of services really varied. A lot of people simply got a very broad orientation of what they can expect, whereas others were actually put in touch with the organizations they need to be in touch with. So there’s kind of a very patchwork approach at the moment of what kinds of supports are out there. And I want to also stress that only permanent residents get access to settlement services. And remember, we currently have a massive temporary resident program. So 1.2 temporary migrants came in in 2022 and half of those were international students. And those folks don’t get access to government funded settlement services. So they rely on if you’re in the case of international students, they rely on their post secondary institution. And that, again, there’s been very haphazard availability of services for those students. So some institutions are really trying to provide some services for them, others don’t. And other students really report that they arrive and they have very little support and they’re trying to navigate kind of settling into Canada, really by themselves. So this gap between permanent versus temporary residents is a really important one because those temporary residents are making up an increasingly large proportion of people who actually then transition to become permanent. And in that initial phase when they come here as temporary, they really don’t get much support. So they’re kind of stumbling in the dark at that time. So you mentioned at the beginning of that answer that the government is aware of some of these issues.

Jordan Are we addressing this stuff in any way before we up our targets so quickly? Like we should probably get stuff in place before we start welcoming half of a million new people a year so that they’re not stumbling in the dark, as you put it.

Rupa Banerjee Yeah, I think there are some efforts, there have been some pilot programs that have been instituted, but as a whole, in a really systematic and systemic way, I’m going to say no, that we haven’t really done a great job of actually dealing with the settlement and integration side of the equation. So we are focusing a lot on selection and who gets brought in and what the points should be and what the cut offs should be. All of those things are done in a very scientific way, in a very systematic way. But when it comes to actually helping people actually navigate the system once they get in, we haven’t done enough. And you’re right, of course, there must be a lot more emphasis on this, I would say, before we bring in all of these new people. At this point they’re coming in. So I think that the one area that I would say really needs a lot of work is employers. We have settlement services, of course, that can be improved, uptake can be improved, access can be improved. But employers are kind of the first crucial step for newcomers to find work in their field and really settle down and find somewhere to live and put their kids in school and all of that. So if employers aren’t really part of this narrative and this solution, then we really won’t make progress. You know, I’ve done interviews with employers, and I think there’s a real kind of gap in understanding of the role that they really play in immigrant integration. So they’re almost seen as, well, immigrants should come here and be integrated, and then we should be able to hire them, where in fact, employers themselves can play an important role in that integration process. So I think that’s something where there’s an educational need from the side of employers that we are really missing.

Jordan What about the infrastructure part of this? Because you mentioned schools also, anybody would tell you our health care system is strapped to the max right now. Are we building enough facilities to make sure that, A, all the newcomers to Canada have access to the actual services that the Canadians have, and B and I guess this is a little bit delicate, but to make sure that we have enough room for it so that it doesn’t breed resentment, right?

Rupa Banerjee Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to say no. As I’ve said, there are efforts that are being put into place, but I don’t think they are adequate. I think particularly when you’re looking at the healthcare system and all of the kind of nightmare scenarios that have been reported in terms of wait times in emergency rooms, et cetera, when you have half a million people coming in in one year, this is bound to exacerbate the situation. So we often think of immigration as kind of a particular issue that’s centered on immigrants and their experiences. But in fact, immigration in Canada must be viewed as much more of a whole of society issue, because ultimately, immigration and immigrants really do kind of integrate into the entirety of our society. So whether it is having enough schools, enough roads, enough healthcare infrastructure in place, all of these things should be part of our immigration system in many ways, right?

Jordan Or immigration should be part of these systems, let alone housing. So let’s put that aside, because that’s another area where I really fear that the scarce resource of housing, particularly in the kind of immigrant centers of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, these areas, the housing prices are such that it’s become almost impossible for newcomers to hope that they’re going to buy a home, you know, in a reasonable period of time after arriving. And this does also breed, you know, resentment and disappointment. So you talk about resentment from the side of Canadians, and that’s certainly one fear. The other fear is resentment and disappointment and disillusionment from the side of the newcomers themselves, and also those who have come in the past ten years or so because ultimately they will also be fighting for those resources. And so if we’re hoping to invite the best and the brightest to come to this country and help us prosper, we want those people to be well integrated, satisfied, happy, employed, and not feeling disillusioned, left out, and really kind of feeling like perhaps they made the wrong choice. Because that has huge detrimental potential, detrimental impacts on Canada and social cohesion within Canada in the future. That’s a great point because Canada is so desirable around the world and at least we’re used to seeing ourselves at the top of these like livability index and attractiveness to immigrants. And if they start coming here and finding that they can’t afford a house and there’s no room in the hospitals and the schools, it’s downhill. Yeah, absolutely.

Jordan And this not only is it kind of detrimental to social cohesion, but if you think forward too, then who’s going to want to come to Canada?

Rupa Banerjee We can’t take for granted that we are going to be the destination of choice for newcomers forever. Yeah, right. So if we want to stay kind of the destination of choice, then we have to have that infrastructure in place so people will want to come here. Otherwise the quality, I’m not really worried that the quantity of applicants will necessarily go down in the foreseeable future, but it is entirely possible that the best will not want to come to a place where there are so many problems to actually being able to work, live and raise their families.

Jordan One of the things I’ve seen you discuss is the sectors that these immigrants are coming to work in and how we might need to change that from the sort of financial focused sectors to more of I think as you put it earlier, the hands on stuff like healthcare and construction. How can we do that? Is that simply a matter of the federal government rewriting? Like what gets you points on your immigration application?

Rupa Banerjee Yeah, in fact they have. So in the new kind of iteration of express entry going forward, there has been some efforts to kind of change around the way that we classified work in order to be a little bit more inclusive. So I would say that’s a positive. So we were able to bring in some workers that would have been excluded from certain programs like the Federal Skilled Workers Program in the past. But I don’t think we’ve quite gone far enough. Like, I recently did an analysis of the kinds of occupational fields that tend to be getting in and it’s really heavily skewed towards tech and finance. Even though we do have larger numbers of people who are sort of in mid skill level kinds of areas and service sector, it’s still a minority. Right? The vast majority tend to be in tech and finance. And while there are job vacancies in those areas as I’ve said, we certainly have job vacancies throughout the economy and even in what we often think of as knock B level jobs. So those jobs that are skilled trades or jobs that don’t require university or postgraduate education but really require perhaps college education, there’s massive gaps in those areas too. Right? So I would argue that we need more emphasis on bringing in a wider range of skills, and how we define skills also needs to be rethought. And I think the government is in the process of doing that to some extent.

Jordan So I know we’re not going to magically transform ourselves overnight, especially with the way we’ve noticed how this government does things. But if you had the power to make a couple of changes to any area that we’ve talked about, whether it’s infrastructure support or targets or whatever, what would you do to try to address as best you could, the issues that we’re facing?

Rupa Banerjee Okay, so there’s a couple of things that the government has announced as changes in the system that I wanted to touch on and I’m concerned about, so I would try to maybe encourage some rethought on them. So up until now, in the express entry system, generally speaking, there’s a target number. And if you hit that number based on your education, your experience, et cetera, your human capital, then you are invited to apply. And now what’s going to happen is there’s also going to be space for the government to dictate what kinds of folks we want to bring in based on criteria that’s kind of vague at the moment. So it could be based on occupations that they feel are lacking workers. It could be based on Francophone applicants. It could be based on what employers are saying they’re looking for. So there’s this kind of room that they have made for discretion in terms of who will be let in. So rather than having kind of very clear cut numbers, and if you meet those numbers, you get called in, it will be a bit more opaque. The process. And we’ve tried something like this in the past, so we’ve had occupation based selection back in the that actually has that was found to be somewhat problematic, because while perhaps you have people coming in to fill skill gaps, of today, those gaps may not exist in five or ten years, and there often ends up being an oversupply of a particular occupational area. So the other thing that this change does is that it adds this opacity to the process, which makes it hard for newcomers who are going through the process to know, well, am I going to get in or am I not?

Jordan So again, when you think about who’s going to want to come to Canada, if the process is not perfectly transparent and apparently fair, then that’s also a reason why the best and the brightest may not want to come to Canada. So this discretionary move, I think, is something I’m concerned about. Now, what would we do to try and make sure that immigrants have better support?

Rupa Banerjee Well, as I said earlier, I think we need to bring in a much more whole of society approach to immigrant integration. And within that whole of society approach, employers and post secondary institutions need to play a bigger and more upfront role in terms of helping immigrants to integrate. So it’s not enough to essentially let people in and then leave them to their own devices and only have settlement services help them out. I think everybody needs to play an important and crucial role in helping to integrate newcomers and their families. Last question, and because I asked it at the beginning of what happens if we don’t bring in immigrants?

Jordan What happens if we don’t make any changes? What happens to Canada and immigration in two 3510 years?

Rupa Banerjee So my fear is that if this next large cohorts of immigrants are not able to find work in their field, if they face the kinds of obstacles that I fear that they may face, then they will form an underclass. And not just them, but those who compete with them, which is newcomers who have come in the past decade or so will really not be able to fit in and belong in Canada. And that will lead to decline in social cohesion within the country. Plus, as I said, the best and the brightest will not be as motivated to come to Canada. And so the motivation for our immigration, which is really to increase our economic prosperity, will be hurt by that process. So that’s my fear is that we have this wonderful rhetoric that kind of bolsters immigration as being a very important and vital thing. And if we don’t back that up, walk the talk essentially, then we’ll have this real kind of dangerous situation where immigrants and not just the immigrants, but their children. Right up until now, we’ve had a very positive story with the children of immigrants doing very well in school, being more likely to graduate university than Canadian born, et cetera. And yet that’s not a guarantee in the future, right? So we need to make sure that immigrants are supported and able to succeed so that we all can succeed. Listen, if there’s one thing we love to do in Canada, it’s hold up an image of ourselves that we don’t live up to on the ground. Well, there you go. Right, exactly. And so I think that that’s my biggest fear, is that there’s a lot of talk and I really hope that we can make sure that it’s actually sustainable.

Jordan Rupa, thank you so much for this. Really informative. I understand the issue much better now.

Rupa Banerjee Thank you so much.

Jordan Rupa Banerjee, Canada Research Chair and economic inclusion, employment and entrepreneurship of Canada’s immigrants. That was the big story. For more from us, you can head to The Big Story podcast dot CA if you recall last Friday, we told a story about how all your stuff kind of sucks now and breaks down. And I was curious if any of you have great stories about items that have survived far, far longer than they should. We got some great ones. I’m not going to share them all now because we’d go on for a long time, but I’ll share one with you. This is from Deborah. She says hi.

CLIP “My mom in the UK was given a fridge in 1957 by my uncle who worked for GEC. It moved around the world with my military family and possibly to five more locations in the UK. It then became the Booze fridge, as great fridges do in the garage as it was so big and bulky. Finally, in 2014, with my mum, dad, my stepfather sold the house and the contents, and the people who bought that house said, please leave that marvellous old fridge in the garage. That’s the kind of fridge that I want to own. 57 to 2014. Possibly still going strong.”

Jordan Thank you, Deborah. You can send us your stories of crazy old things still working just fine by reaching out on Twitter at The Big Story FPN by emailing us hello at The Big Story podcast dot CA. And, of course, by calling and leaving a voicemail. 416-935-5935 you can hit me up personally if you’ve got a vintage 1957 fridge that I can use for my booze. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawling. We’ll talk tomorrow.