OTTAWA - A new report highlighting the struggles new immigrants face in Canada's workforce shows the Conservative government is failing to address the issues of foreign credentials recognition and other workforce integration initiatives, said Liberal Critic for Citizenship and Immigration Maurizio Bevilacqua.
"It is deeply disturbing that having a university degree has virtually no impact on employment rates for new immigrants," he said. "This report shows that the Conservative government is ignoring the unique challenges that new immigrants face in succeeding in the Canadian economy -challenges that have grown larger under their watch and will only grow further as the recession deepens.
"Canada will rely on immigration for population growth for decades to come. New Canadians deserve every opportunity to succeed and far too many are not realizing the Canadian Dream. We cannot afford to allow the gap between immigrant and non-immigrant income to continue to grow. Our focus should be on maximizing Canada's human resources potential."
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities today released a report that compiles a raft of statistics from a variety of sources to develop profiles of the success - or lack thereof - of immigrants living in Canada's 24 largest cities for five years or less. Amongst its findings are that:
- 43 percent of new immigrants have household incomes below Statistics Canada's Low Income Cut-Off (LICO);
- the unemployment rate of recent immigrants with a university degree is four times that of non-immigrants with university degrees;
- recent immigrants are over-represented in service industries, and under-represented in management positions;
- participation of recent immigrants in the labour force is significantly lower than established immigrants and non-immigrants;
- almost half of recent immigrants spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing - although it is not uncommon for them to be spending more than half of their income on housing; and
- municipalities, including Toronto, York region, Waterloo, London and Niagara, have had to develop programs to help immigrants whose foreign credentials are not recognized because the federal government's foreign credentials programs are not working.
"The Harper government has provided funds to support the work of provinces on foreign credential recognition, but they refuse to take responsibility for the issue themselves," said Mr. Bevilacqua.
"Clearly it's not enough to leave provinces and municipalities on their own to deal with this issue," he said. "Cities are the primary providers of immigrant settlement services, and are performing more work with less support from the federal government.
"This government must do a better job of ensuring that cities have the resources and tools to provide support to new Canadians. They also have a responsibility to work with cities as full partners on immigration issues - something they have systematically failed to do for three years," he said.
Budget 2008 also provided a paltry $32 million to reform the immigration application system, but there was not a penny for immigrant settlement initiatives, which is what is desperately needed.
"This is not just a matter of bringing fairness and equity to new Canadians. Ensuring our immigrant population is able to fully participate in the labour force is critical to the Canadian economy as a whole, particularly during these tough economic times. It's time this government recognized that fact," Mr. Bevilacqua said.