Many Immigrants to Canada Are Falling Behind

Feb 1, 2011
Rupert Taylor

Canada Has many well-Educated Taxi Drivers. - Tom Magliery

Statistics show that new Canadians are finding it harder to get their first job and are being paid less than their native-born counterparts.

Here’s a story that paints an unattractive picture of Canada’s immigration and settlement system.

Dr. Rebecca Cook (not her real name but, nonetheless, a real person) graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1981 and has subsequently gathered multiple qualifications in internal medicine, anesthesia, and integrative medicine; and you can toss in a master’s degree in theology for good measure.

When Dr. Cook and her family came to Canada to settle in 2005, she found barriers to practising medicine here that have caused her to return to the United States. Although fully qualified in one of what Immigration Canada lists as “29 highly demanded professions,” Dr. Cook has been lost to Canada.

She is not alone.

Canada’s Underemployed Immigrants

According to a 2006 Statistics Canada study “recent immigrants - those in Canada for 10 years or less - had a higher incidence of over-qualification than their Canadian-born counterparts.” More than half the newcomers (52%) with university degrees worked in jobs that only needed a high school diploma. Among Canadian-born post-secondary grads the figure was 28%.

Two years later, same story. In November 2009, Shannon Proudfoot of Canwest News Service reported on a Statistics Canada from the previous year: “…more than 1.1 million workers aged 25 to 54 with a university degree were under-employed in jobs requiring a college education or apprenticeship last year, and immigrants are 1.5 times more likely to fall into that category than their Canadian-born counterparts.”

The same study found immigrants were paid an average of $2.28 an hour less than native-born Canadians. For those who had been in Canada less than five years, the gap was $5.

All Qualifications Are Not Equal

Part of the problem is because credentials don’t match.

In Canada, physicians regulate themselves and license those allowed to practice. Catherine Clarke is media relations officer for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. She is quoted in the University of Western Ontario Gazette (“Immigrants Underemployed,” Angela Easby, November 30, 2009) as saying, “For immigrants entering a regulated field, such as Ontario health care, where and from who they obtained their medical degree is very important.”

A degree in medicine from a university in Oman (picked by the European Council as among the worst in the world) is obviously not going to give its holder hospital privileges in Canada without a bit of upgrading. But it seems foolish to make an eye surgeon who graduated from Harvard University pass more exams and undergo a residency before being allowed to practise in Edmonton.

Ms. Clarke claims the college has had a lot of success with the program.

However, there seems to be something amiss with the certification system as reported by The Vancouver Sun (“Kafka’s Canada Ignores Under-employed Foreign Doctors,” September 22, 2006): “An estimated 3.6 million Canadians cannot find a family doctor, yet as many as 8,000 immigrants trained and licensed abroad as physicians are not allowed to practise in Canada.”

The newspaper goes on to explain that provincial colleges “won’t license a foreign doctor without a written job offer. Regional health authorities won’t offer a job to a foreign doctor without a licence.”

So, family physicians drive cabs while Canadians queue up in emergency departments because they can’t find a doctor to deal with routine ailments.

Underemployment Not Restricted to Professions

While people with PhDs are selling jeans in outlet malls, and others with master’s degrees are waiting on tables, Canada’s less qualified immigrants are also having a difficult time.

Anna Mehler Paperny wrote in The Globe and Mail (“Jobless Rate Up for Toronto Immigrants,” December 4, 2010) that, “Nearly one in five recent immigrants in Toronto is jobless.” While the unemployment rate was 6.7% in November 2010, among newcomers it was 19.7%.

In Quebec, desperate immigrants are being exploited. Les Perreaux of the Globe and Mail (“Quebec to Investigate Exploitation of Immigrant Workers,” October 21, 2010) writes that the province’s “Ministry of Revenue is preparing a crackdown on dozens of temporary agencies that avoid taxes by hiring recent immigrants and paying them in cash – as little as $6.50 an hour – to fill jobs at industrial butcher shops and produce warehouses.”

Settling in to a new country is not easy at the best of times but unnecessary barriers seem to make it even harder in Canada.